


Little Red and the Big, Bad Wolves

by Ely_Baby



Series: Lilium & Scorpiones [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Community: interhouse_fest, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Mystery, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-01 14:55:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2777276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ely_Baby/pseuds/Ely_Baby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Scorpius is asked to protect the Head Auror's daughter, the last thing he expected was to fall in love with her… or to find himself in the middle of a war, really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The One with the “Sweet” Girl

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://interhouse-fest.livejournal.com/profile)[interhouse_fest](http://interhouse-fest.livejournal.com), for the prompt: #205
> 
> Originally posted [here](http://interhouse-fest.livejournal.com/90926.html).
> 
> Beta-read by Zeldagirl367.
> 
>   
> 

***

“Your new case.”  
  
That was all Teddy Lupin said when Scorpius walked in before throwing a folder to Scorpius from the other side of his office. Fortunately for Scorpius, he was an Auror with incredibly developed reflexes, so much so that he only fumbled the folder twice before he had his fingers tightly wrapped around it.  
  
He looked at the folder with diffidence. The Head Auror was in France for a month, coordinating the security of the English Quidditch Team during this year’s Quidditch World Cup, and Auror Teddy Lupin was organising the Department during his absence, and he often came up with unpleasant jobs for the youngest Aurors; just to have a laugh, really.  
  
There was no name on the folder, which was surprising; they usually had names and dates and other details that made the storing less complicated for whoever was unfortunate enough to be assigned to the archive that week.  
  
He cocked an eyebrow as he raised his eyes on Teddy. “My case? Or Potter’s and mine?”  
  
“Just yours,” replied Teddy.  
  
Scorpius furrowed his brow when the senior Auror nodded towards the folder, as if to tell him to open it.  
  
He did.  
  
And he stared.  
  
On the first page had been stapled the picture of a girl. She had a long cascade of red, shiny hair that disappeared behind frame of the photograph, freckles all over her face and big, brown eyes. The girl was smiling and fluttering her eyelashes to the camera. She looked like a lovely young lady with whom Scorpius wouldn’t have minded working one bit.  
  
Teddy closed the door at his back.  
  
“Don’t let that picture fool you,” he told him grimly, “she’s quite… a handful.”  
  
“Who is she?” he asked. She looked very much like a Weasley, and he didn’t want to turn the page and find the surname printed everywhere. There was nothing wrong with the Weasleys, really, but he had met enough at Hogwarts to last him a lifetime.  
  
“Her name is Lily Luna Potter; 21 years old, and a journalist for the Daily Prophet. She spent the last three years travelling as—”  
  
“Potter?” Scorpius’ complexion was naturally pale, but somehow he felt the little colour he had drain from his face at the mention of the name. He looked down at the picture once again.  
  
Teddy nodded. “Potter,” he confirmed.  
  
“You mean…”  
  
He nodded again. “The Head Auror’s youngest child, yes, that’s what I mean.”  
  
Scorpius darkened. “Is this a baby-sitting job?” he asked rather dryly. He was glad that the Head Auror was not there, so at least he had a chance at refusing the job.  
  
“No,” he replied calmly as he leant his elbows on his desk, “it’s a protection program.”  
  
“Why me?” asked Scorpius, trying to hide the suspicion that was already seeping through his voice. “I mean, her brothers are Aurors, her father is the Head of the Department, why can’t they spare a moment to look after her?”  
  
Teddy chuckled softly. “Word of advice: when you talk to her, don’t use the words ‘baby-sitting’ or ‘look after’.” He leant back against his chair and scratched his stubble-covered chin. “The Head Auror is out of the country, as you know, Albus is busy with another case at the moment, and James has already tried his hand at the job. He lasted two days.”  
  
“What? I didn’t know.”  
  
“It’s a secret mission, Scorpius.”  
  
He glanced at the girl again; she was giggling and winking. “What happened?” he asked.  
  
“She hexed him,” he replied evenly, “right in the arse.”  
  
“Beg your pardon?” He looked at him, trying to understand if he was having a laugh. “Who hexed him?”  
  
Teddy nodded at the picture. “Miss Potter.”  
  
He shook his head to clear his head. “But she was the one he was protecting.”  
  
He nodded almost in a commiserating way. “Miss Potter is working on a piece for the upcoming New Year Special Edition of the Daily Prophet. All we know is that it has something to do with Werewolves, but she won’t tell exactly what it is.”  
  
Scorpius looked at the picture for the third time. She looked so sweet and nice.  
  
“What happened? Why does she need protection?”  
  
In reply, Teddy nodded towards the file in Scorpius’ hands.  
  
Scorpius turned the page. There was a short report on the girl. Her address, her details and what had happened. He skimmed through the text.  
  
Miss Potter had started working on whatever she was working on at the beginning of February. The last week of July she had gone missing for 48 hours. Her editor had called the Aurors, but before they could even start an operation or organise a searching party, she reappeared that same day, and went back to work as if nothing had happened. She was assigned Auror James Sirius Potter as a protector, but he spent more time trying to track her down than he did actually protecting her – or so the report said, in very angry handwriting that was undoubtedly James’. When he finally managed to localise her in Knockturn Alley, she hexed him (oh yes, right in the arse apparently, and with a Tickling Hex) and disappeared once more.  
  
Scorpius imagined dinner in the Potter household must have been awkward that night.  
  
He kept reading and found out that Miss Potter had been admitted to the hospital the day before with signs of a violent fight all over her body, and bite marks on her waist.  
  
She was tested for lycanthropy, but the test came back negative.  
  
“So she’s in the hospital.”  
  
Teddy shook his head. “Al was there with her this morning. She asked for a tea and when he came back to her room, she was gone.”  
  
“Gone?” She started to sound like trouble and despite the fact that Scorpius loved a good challenge, he wasn’t that keen to start playing hide-and-seek with the Head Auror’s daughter.  
  
“Gone back to work,” replied Teddy. “She left a note, and when Al went to newspaper headquarters he found her there.” He took a deep breath. “She stayed about ten minutes, just enough time to argue with her brother, and then she was gone again.”  
  
“And where’s she now?”  
  
Teddy shrugged his shoulders. “That’s your job, Auror,” he said, “find her and keep her safe.”  
  
Scorpius closed the folder and looked up at Teddy. “Excuse me?” He raised his hands, palms up. “How do I look after her, if I don’t know where she is?”  
  
Teddy raised a finger. “Don’t say ‘look after’,” he scolded. “And actually, don’t even use the word  _protect_  because she doesn’t like that either.”  
  
Scorpius wrinkled his nose. “She sounds quite like a little princess gone out of control to me,” he replied. “I imagine she was Gryffindor, wasn’t she? Always looking down on the whole world because she’s the only daughter of Harry Potter and treating everybody else like scum… and she travelled, right? Went to Paris or Italy to learn a language that nobody even needs just to use it in some bloody restaurant, I bet…”  
  
Teddy rolled his eyes. “Oh Merlin, Scorpius! You’re such a perceptive young man,” he scoffed. “She was a Hufflepuff, when she was sixteen she tried to change her surname, hexed the employee who wouldn’t let her because she was underage, and she spent the last three years working for the Prophet as a correspondent on for the Magizoology column.”  
  
Scorpius raised his chin, his cheeks turning quite crimson for just how wrong he was about her. “Hufflepuff?” he asked lightly. “No wonder I don’t remember her.”  
  
“You really want to go there, Scorpius?” asked Teddy, arms crossed.  
  
Merlin, what was wrong with him? Teddy was a Hufflepuff. He shook his head rather sheepishly. “So, when do I start?” he asked with an overdramatic sigh.  
  
“To be quite honest, Harry Floo Called this morning and said that he wanted you to start last week,” he replied, “but right now is good too.”  
  
***  
  
The Daily Prophet was a mess. A proper mess. People were running here and there, and most of them were screaming at each other. There were so many memos flying that they looked like a flock of birds as they migrated from side to side over the heads of the journalists. Quick-Quotes Quills were assaulting pieces of parchments in midair so ferociously that their screeching filled the room and made Scorpius’ hair stand on his neck.  
  
It looked worse than the Ministry at 7:45 in the morning.  
  
Luckily they had an information desk right at the entrance, and even though the old witch with dark hair and a pair of extravagant-lunettes looked particularly apathetic, Scorpius walked to her and cleared his throat to make her raise her eyes from the Magical Symbol game she was trying to complete and acknowledge him.  
  
“Welcome to the Daily Prophet,” she announced flatly, without even looking up at him. “If you want to deliver fan mail, please put it in the right basket. If you want to deliver hate mail, please put it in the left basket. If you’d like to apply for a job with us, please put your application in the basket in the middle.”  
  
“I… no. I’m here to see one of the journalists,” he told her, trying to sound commanding.  
  
She finally placed the newspaper in her lap and looked up at him. “Who?”  
  
“I’m here for Miss Lily Luna Potter,” he replied, puffing out his chest and trying to push his Auror badge into her nose. “Is she here?”  
  
“Why do you want to see her?”  
  
“That’s private information,” replied Scorpius. “Can you tell me where I can find her?”  
  
“Miss Potter doesn’t like fans.”  
  
“I’m not a fan.”  
  
“Miss Potter doesn’t like haters.”  
  
Scorpius took a deep breath. “I’m not a hater,” he gritted through his teeth, “I am an Auror.”  
  
The woman snorted in his face. “Miss Potter doesn’t like Aurors.”

He placed his hands on her desk and tried to look as menacing as possible. “Listen, I am here to work, I need to talk to Miss Potter right at this—”  
  
“Alice! Alice! Have you finished the game yet?” A short, bald man with a pair of glasses on his nose and another pair secured over his forehead, trotted out of a door and grabbed the newspaper from the woman’s lap. He surveyed the half-finished game and groaned. “Oh Merlin! Is it too difficult again? We’re going to get so much hate mail.”  
  
“It’s not, Mr Quills,” replied the woman flatly, “I’ve been interrupted.” She nodded towards Scorpius and the man looked at him as well.  
  
He seemed to notice his Ministry badge straight away. “Aurors? Again?” He rolled his eyes. “Listen, I’ve already told your colleague that we don’t usually use Veritaserum on our interviewees. Ms Skeeter had admitted her faults and she’s on Sabbatical. And Mrs Warbeck hasn’t even reported her.”  
  
Scorpius raised his hands near his head. “I’m not here for Mrs Warbeck,” he told him, “I’m here for Miss Potter.”  
  
“You are?” asked the man taken aback. Then slowly, his surprise changed in amusement. “Oh right! Of course! I honestly thought that they weren’t sending anybody else for her after what had happened last time.” He drew out his wand from his pocket and pointed it to his throat. “ _Sonorus_ ,” he muttered, before calling, “Potter! Potter! Get your arse to the front desk!” He murmured the counter-spell and looked at Scorpius. “Listen, we are very worried for Miss Potter’s safety, but she’s working on something big. Can you please not blow her case?”  
  
Scorpius narrowed his eyes. “I’m here to protect her.”  
  
“Sure, sure,” he replied, lowering his voice, “don’t tell her that though.”  
  
“And for the love of Merlin,” added the woman, “don’t anger her.”  
  
“What are you—”  
  
“What is it, Quills?” snapped a voice that was anything but sweet. “I was going out. Do you want me to finish that damn article before the issue comes out or not?”  
  
Scorpius raised his eyes from the woman in front of him to look at the witch who had just approached the desk.  
  
Well, he was damned if she was the same girl of the picture.  
  
She was wearing no cute little dress. She had a pair of Muggle jeans all torn and dirty, and a shirt that had some blood staining the hem.  
  
She had no shiny hair, but a mass of dreadlocks that reached her waist and gave her quite the I-was-raised-in-the-jungle look.  
  
And she certainly had no lovely smile. She looked like her lips could do pretty much anything except smiling. Snarl and scream and grit her teeth like an animal were surely at the top of the list.  
  
She was also rather short – but of course, the Head Auror was no giant himself – and sported a nasty bruise on her thin neck.  
  
She stepped until she was standing right in front of Quills and folded her arms across her chest, looking supremely annoyed.  
  
“It’s exactly because I want you to finish your article that I called you here,” replied Quills. He nodded towards Scorpius. “You have a visit.”  
  
She turned to finally look at him, her brown eyes seemed to evaluate every inch of his face, before they travelled south. When she reached his chest, her annoyed expression became furious. She turned towards Mr Quills and snapped, “An Auror? You asked for another Auror?”  
  
Mr Quills took a step back. “I did no such thing,” he replied promptly. “They sent him from the Ministry. It must have been your father.”  
  
“Well, tell him to go back! I don’t need a baby-sitter!”  
  
“Hey, I’m right here,” protested Scorpius.  
  
“Well, go back!” snapped Miss Potter to him. “I don’t need a baby-sitter.”  
  
Scorpius gritted his teeth. “I’m not here to baby-sit you,” he replied, “I’m here to protect you.”  
  
“I don’t need protection!” she snarled. “Go back to the Ministry and tell Teddy that if he sends someone else, I’m going to go back to work with Luna and Rolf!” She turned on her heels and disappeared amongst the crowd of journalists who was only mildly interested in the scene.  
  
Scorpius blinked as he tried to make sense of what had just happened.  
  
“Well, go after her,” urged Mr Quills. “Her office is the last one in the second corridor to the left.” He lowered his eyes on the newspaper in his hands and smiled. “Ah, I see the St Mungo’s crest, Alice, and you just missed it!”  
  
Scorpius stared at Mr Quills and Alice for a fistful of seconds, before turning towards the place where Miss Potter had just disappeared. Well, wasn’t she a peach? Scorpius just couldn’t wait to work with her…  
  
He bumped into a tall man who was dictating to his quill something about the recent mishaps with the Floo Network. The man didn’t even seem to notice him. And right before he could knock on what he hoped was Miss Potter’s door a memo flew in his ear and he had to shoo it away with his hand.  
  
“Go away!” was the reply that came from the other side.  
  
Oh yes, it was the right door. He pushed it open and walked inside, straightening his back and darkening. “Now you listen to…” His voice died in his throat as he stared at his boss’ daughter standing in front of him in her bra and Muggle jeans, and with a bandaging that covered most of her lower abdomen.  
  
She looked irritated at him and crossed her arms under her breasts.  
  
“I’m… I’m sorry,” mumbled Scorpius, looking away from those beautiful breasts that looked soft and smooth. “I… I just…”  
  
“You just what?” snapped Miss Potter. “You just don’t speak my language? You just can’t hear? Because I said ‘go away’ not ‘come in’.” He could see that she mimed the two verbs out of the corner of his eyes.  
  
“Listen, Miss Potter,” he started, still not looking at her, “I didn’t ask for this job. I was given it by my boss. I’m sorry if this interferes with your plans of going and getting killed, but my mission is to keep you alive and that’s—”  
  
“Look, just spare me the rant about how you hate this as much as I do,” she cut him off curtly, as she started to put her shirt back on. “Why don’t we do this? You go back to your Manor, and I just won’t tell them that you’re home reading a book and drinking a cup of tea instead of tailing me.”  
  
He raised his eyes on her as she buttoned up her now clean shirt. “How do you know I live in a Manor?”  
  
She looked at him and laughed. “Honestly, Malfoy?”  
  
He flared his nostrils and raised his chin haughtily. “How do you know my name?”   
  
Her laughter died out. “Are you having a laugh?” she scoffed. “We were at school together.”  
  
He crossed his arms on his chest and darkened. He didn’t remember her at all. How did she remember him? Well, of course, there was only one Malfoy against thousands of Potters and Weasleys. It was no surprise he had difficulties placing her.  
  
“Oh of course,” she mocked him, “you don’t remember me. Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy, Slytherin; not a people person, lives in a Manor and has money falling out of his arsehole…”  
  
“Hey!” he protested, but yes, her description was rather accurate. “I remember you! You were a Hufflepuff, and you’re the Head Auror’s daughter and… and your name is Lily Luna Potter.”  
  
“You read my file.” Her voice was low and dangerous.  
  
“No, I—”  
  
“I told my father to destroy it! But of course he didn’t listen!” she snapped, talking to herself rather than Scorpius. She pushed back her dreadlocks and started grabbing piles of parchment and stuffing them into a small, bag decorated with little colourful beads. “Oh, next time I see him, he’s going to hear me. If he doesn’t destroy it, I’ll do it, and it won’t be pleasant. They’ll have to send me to Azkaban after that.” She threw the bag over her shoulder and, without looking at Scorpius, headed towards the door.  
  
“Oi! Where are you going?” He stepped in front of her to block her way.  
  
She looked at him as if he was crazy. “Out, to do my job,” she replied in a huff.  
  
“Yeah, okay, well, I’m coming with you.”  
  
She laughed at him. “You’re funny.”  
  
“I’m not joking,” he growled.  
  
She stared seriously at him for a long moment and Scorpius stared back at her just as gravely.  
  
“Oh, I see,” she finally sighed. “You follow orders from above.” She stood on tiptoes and patted his perfectly combed hair as if he was a dog. “Good boy! Who’s a good boy?”  
  
“Hey!”  
  
“Here,” she told him, turning to fumble with something. “Hold on this for a moment, will you?” She passed him a pot with some sort of succulent plant that he had never seen before. It moved and purred like a cat when he closed his hands around the pot.  
  
“Thank you,” she told him with a smile, before turning it into a smirk and adding, “Idiot.” And with a subtle pop she was gone.  
  
Scorpius just stood there. Plant in his hands and mouth wide open.  
  
Bloody hell, he  _was_  an idiot.  
  
***  
  
“What do you mean, you lost her?”  
  
Scorpius turned away from Teddy as he opened Lily Luna Potter’s file, turning the pages frantically. “I mean that she was standing there and then she was handing me a plant to keep me busy and then she was gone. That’s what I mean.”  
  
Teddy chuckled. “At least she didn’t hex you. She must like you.”  
  
Scorpius grunted in reply, “Ah, yes, she looked like she was crazy about me.”  
  
“What are you looking for?”  
  
“Her address,” snapped Scorpius. “She has to go home at some point and I’ll be right there waiting for her when she does.”  
  
“143 Diagon Alley,” said Teddy flatly.  
  
Scorpius slammed the file close and turned to look at him.  
  
“She’s my godfather’s daughter,” he told him, “she’s like a sister to me.”  
  
“Good for you,” scoffed Scorpius. “That’s when I feel lucky to be an only child.”  
  
***  
  
143 Diagon Alley was a narrow and tall building, crushed between Amanuensis Quills and Madam Malkin’s Robes for all Occasions and with a small entry and a wall covered in post-boxes.  
  
Miss Potter’s one was swarming with advertisements and some past issues of the Daily Prophet. Scorpius tried to reach beneath all the rubbish that was magically pushing its way inside the box. Maybe under all those things there was a letter or something that it might have helped him to understand what the heck she was doing.  
  
“Oi! That’s violation of privacy!”  
  
Scorpius took a deep breath as he disentangled his hands from all that junk and turned to look at the young man who had talked to him. He was a tall, dark skinned, boy who couldn’t have been older than twenty. He had dreadlocks that reached his shoulders, and Scorpius couldn’t help groaning at the sour look on his face.  
  
“I’m an Auror,” he told him in his most authoritative voice, “and I’m working on a case.”  
  
The boy’s eyes opened wide. “Did something happen to Lily?” he asked concerned. “Is she okay? She isn’t…” He swallowed as he left the sentence hanging in midair. He looked really rather scared. Scorpius couldn’t help staring at his mass of dreadlocks and imagining that he had been the one to introduce the Head Auror’s daughter to such a dirty way of keeping her hair. And maybe introduce her to other things too, like skinny dipping with a group of hippies or have sex with more than one person at the same time.  
  
“She isn’t dead,” Scorpius finished for him. “Not that I know of, at least.” He raised his pointy chin and looked seriously at him. “Do you know Miss Potter well?” he asked slowly.  
  
He nodded frantically. “Yes, of course,” he replied, “I know everything about her. She… she is awesome. She’s a great friend.”  
  
“Is this your relationship with Miss Potter? Are you friends with her?”  
  
He nodded and shrugged a shoulder, giving the hint of a smile. “Yeah, friends, you know, and I mean we have fun sometimes, and it’s fun… you know…”  
  
Scorpius wrinkled his nose at him. “Of course,” he replied coldly. “What do you know about the case she’s following?”  
  
The boy looked rather abashed all of a sudden. “Well, she goes out a lot… and at night especially… and she is always a bit cranky when there’s a full moon.”  
  
Scorpius cocked an eyebrow. “How can you tell that she’s cranky?”  
  
“Well, she’s usually sweet and lovely and—”  
  
“Are we talking about the same Miss Potter?” asked Scorpius, his eyebrows now knitting together on his forehead.  
  
The boy smiled dumbly. “There’s only one, isn’t there?”  
  
Scorpius resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Of course,” he replied through gritted teeth. “Right, so you basically don’t know anything about her.”  
  
“What?” He looked outraged. “Listen, mate, I know everything about her.”  
  
“Except what she is working on,” he replied, “which frankly is the only thing I’m interested in.” He narrowed his eyes and stared at the boy from head to toes. “Do you work here?” he asked.  
  
He nodded. “I’m the caretaker.”  
  
“So you have the keys to all the flats?”  
  
He nodded again, rather reluctantly now.  
  
“Do you have the key to Miss Potter’s flat?”  
  
The boy bit his bottom lip. “I don’t think she would appreciate it if I gave you the key to her flat, mate,” he told him, “she doesn’t like when people invade her privacy.” He looked like he had tried the consequences of invading her privacy on his own skin.  
  
Scorpius gave him the hint of a smile. “Well, let’s put it like this,” he said matter-of-factly, “if you don’t give me the key to her flat, I’ll have to arrest you for the crime of hindering justice. And after a quick trial, I’m sure there’s Azkaban waiting for whoever may put the Head Auror’s daughter’s life in danger by withholding information.”  
  
He seemed to actually consider what was worse. Azkaban or the wrath of a little girl? Luckily he seemed to be more scared about Azkaban than her. Not by much though.  
  
“Thank you,” said Scorpius, looking into his eyes as the young man deposited a little, brass-like key into his palm.  
  
“Third floor, the second on the left,” he told him. “There’s a strong scent of incense coming from it. You can’t get it wrong.”  
  
He nodded in reply and headed towards the dimly-lit stairs that brought upstairs. The place was not bad per se, but it looked like one of those buildings that housed more people than was legally accepted. He imagined youngsters bunking in little studio flats just to share the rent. And bloody hell, he didn’t even ask that guy downstairs if she lived alone. He fervently hoped so.  
  
He flattened against the wall when two girls walked down the stairs, chatting animatedly and laughing unpleasantly. They didn’t even notice that he had to stop to let them pass. What a bunch of hippies.  
  
The third floor was clogged with the scent of incense, and it definitely came from the second door on the left. She was probably using it to cover the smell of piles of dirty laundry and leftover food scattered through her kitchen.  
  
He fitted the key into the door and unlocked it. Then he pushed it open and stared.  
  
The flat was small – he suspected that it would fit into the drawing room at his Manor – and from where he was standing he could see the other end of it.  
  
He walked inside and locked the door at his back.  
  
The open kitchen was at his left, the living room took up most of the rest of the space, and there were two doors which he imagined led to the bathroom and a bedroom, or maybe a little closet, and that was all.  
  
The whole place was filled with the most extravagant and bizarre things he had ever seen. There were strings of colourful, square flags hanging on the ceiling and enchanted to fluctuate as if there was a breeze. An ebony statue of a couple having sex in a very inventive position decorated an otherwise bare shelf, while a large chest of drawers with painted exotic animals moving around its patterns occupied most of the wall at his right. Big sacks of spices on the floor sent a smell almost stronger than the incense that was burning dangerously close to the couch. No, it wasn’t a couch, it was a bazaar of cushions and pillows.  
  
At least the place was clean, and there wasn’t a pile of dirty clothes or other disgusting things. It was also fairly tidy – as tidy as a place covered in cushions and drapes could be.  
  
Scorpius drew out his wand and walked towards the couch. “ _Aguamenti_ ,” he muttered as he pointed it towards the incense. The stick sent out a rather unpleasant smell as it died out.  
  
He looked at it, satisfied, and thought of opening the window to let some fresh air in. But he wasn’t having a house tour, he was there to work. He was there to find something that would point him in the direction of what Miss Potter was working on.  
  
The chest of drawers looked like a particularly good place where to hide documents and notes that she wouldn’t want anybody to find. He walked to it and grabbed a brass ring, trying to pull one of the top drawers open. It didn’t even budge.  
  
“Password.”  
  
Scorpius let the ring go and stepped back, looking down at the drawer with his brow furrowed. An elephant the size of a Galleon was looking up at him with its nose stuck up in the air.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Password,” repeated the animal.  
  
He knew it had seemed too damn easy to be true. Scorpius shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t know,” he replied, “ _Hufflepuff rocks_?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“ _I am a hippie_?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“ _Aurors stink_?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“ _I have a death wish_?”  
  
“I’m sorry, you finished your chances. You have to go to the monkey.” And with that the elephant lowered its long nose and sat down on a little meander.  
  
“What? Listen, you need to open these drawers right at this instant. I am an Auror and I am conducting an investigation,” he snapped, “and if you don’t open them, I’m going to make firewood out of you.”  
  
“Password! Password! Password!” snickered the monkey, jumping from one Greek fret to another. The other animals laughed too.  
  
Scorpius glowered at them. He raised his wand and flicked it. “ _Accio parchment_!” he growled.  
  
There was the noise of pieces of parchment slamming against the inside of the drawers and the animals started to snarl at him, but before he could even hex them shut, a heavy pile of letters and documents hit him right on the head and fell at his feet.  
  
“Bloody hell!” he grunted as he rubbed his scalp and stared at the mess he had involuntarily Summoned from every place in the flat. There were letters, lists, medical reports, notes, even a shopping list and doodles of some kind of animal. He started to rummage through them in the hope of finding something interesting.  
  
Amongst other things, Miss Potter seemed to have a business card for a place called The Blue Moon. He narrowed his eyes. He knew it, The Blue Moon was a club or something in Knockturn Alley; it was said to be owned by a pack of werewolves, but since they’d never had problems with the law, the Aurors let them do their thing in peace.  
  
She also had a letter sent from someone who signed themselves as  _her number one fan_ , who wrote a poem about her eyes and her nose and ears. Miss Potter had drawn a girl stabbing a man after the last stanza.  
  
And then there was a letter from the Ministry. Scorpius opened it carefully and drew out a slip of parchment that confirmed her appointment for tomorrow at ten in the morning at the Portkey Office. On the back someone had quickly scribbled a  _We need to talk about it, Lily. U.P._  
  
There were more letters from people who were clearly poetically-impaired about her beautiful hair – and they were probably blind too – and her smile – and they imagined things – and her breasts – okay, those were all right.  
  
He picked up another letter which talked about her eyes.  
  
“An Auror? And you let him into my flat, Dave?”  
  
Scorpius’ head snapped up as he heard Miss Potter’s voice coming from the landing.  
  
“I’m sorry, Lily, he said he would have sent me to Azkaban if I didn’t.” The caretaker’s voice was almost pleading.  
  
Scorpius fumbled around on the floor as he tried to pick up all the notes and letters and hide them somewhere.  
  
“Merlin, you can be an idiot!” snapped Miss Potter.  
  
“Lily, no, you know I cry myself to sleep when you are angry with me,” whined the boy.  
  
“Get off me,” she snarled, probably pushing him away.  
  
“Lily…”  
  
“Oh, bloody hell!” There was a muttered spell and then the boy was squeaking and then bats were screeching and flapping their winds on the landing. Then the boy was probably running down the stairs and… crying…  
  
Scorpius looked at the door rather more anxiously than he normally would if discovered in a flat during an investigation. He turned to look around himself for any possible escape, and luckily she had a fireplace; even though it took him a while to locate since it was covered in drapes as well. He hurried in there, grabbed some Floo Powder from the floor and threw it at his feet as he said out loud, “The Ministry of Magic!” and closed his eyes the moment the door opened.  
  
***  
  
When he opened them again, he was still standing in the fireplace, covered from head to toe in common ashes and with a very angry-looking Lily Luna Potter staring at him from her living room.  
  
He felt his heart sink a little. “You are not connected to the Floo,” he murmured.  
  
“Well, aren’t you a genius?” she deadpanned, before narrowing her eyes and folding her arms across her chest. Her shirt was already not clean anymore, and the bruise on her neck had darkened in the few hours that he hadn’t seen her. “What are you doing in my flat?”  
  
Scorpius stepped out of the fireplace and shook the ashes from his head and shoulders. “Looking for you, Miss Potter,” he replied seriously. “I don’t care if you don’t like it, I am here to help prevent an untimely death, and you’re definitely not making it easy for me to keep—”  
  
“You rummaged through my things!?”  
  
He followed her eyes to the pile of badly-hidden documents.  
  
Scorpius swallowed. “I was trying to find clues of your whereabouts,” he replied sourly, “I didn’t mean to read any private correspondence, and I’m sorry if I—”  
  
“You,” she cut him off, stepping towards him and poking his chest with a pale finger. “You are going back to the Ministry right this instant to tell them that I don’t need a nanny.”  
  
“I’m not—”  
  
“And if you don’t,” she cut him off again, “I’m going to press charges against you for housebreaking.” She pursed her lips and added, “And I’ll tell them that you raped me.”  
  
Scorpius’ jaw dropped. “What?” he exclaimed, his voice an octave higher than what it usually was. “They’ll never believe you, I’m… I’m absolutely—”  
  
She furrowed her brow in concentration. “You’re right,” she told him, “you’re gay, so they’ll never believe me.”  
  
“Oi! What the hell is that supposed to mean?”  
  
She snorted. “Please; those shoes, that ridiculous hair and those ironed clothes?”  
  
He looked down at his expensive longwings and his perfectly starched uniform. His house-elves took care of those things. “I’m not gay!” he protested, before nodding at her. “Anyway, you look like you would assault a girl at any given moment.”  
  
She shrugged a shoulder. “If she’s pretty, why wouldn’t I assault her?” she replied nonchalantly.  
  
Scorpius stared at her, as he tried to push images of Lily Luna Potter and another girl together, maybe naked, touching that smooth-looking skin of hers while they kissed.  
  
“You’re drooling.”  
  
He close his mouth and swallowed, his hand going automatically to his chin. “I’m not,” he replied, flushing violently. “Listen, Miss Potter, it’s as clear as day that we’ve started on the wrong foot here.”  
  
“That’s right, I should have kicked you out of my office; that would have been a right foot.” She narrowed her eyes. “Right in your arse.”  
  
He opened his mouth and then closed it again, unable to find anything to reply to her. Bloody hell, she was the most stubborn and impolite person he had ever come into contact with. And to be quite fair, he too thought that she didn’t need a nanny. She needed someone who put her over his knee to give her a good spanking.  
  
And no, he didn’t mean that in a sexual way.  
  
Well, maybe just a little bit.  
  
“Listen, I—”  
  
“Get. Out.”  
  
“I’m not going anywhere until you—”  
  
She drew out her wand. “You know what a Bat-Bogey Hex is?” she asked nonchalantly. “It Transfigures your bogeys into bats and they fly out of your nose. I can assure you, it’s not pleasant.” She pointed her wand to his face and then lowered it. “I’ve perfected an alteration of it. Something else comes out of somewhere else.”  
  
She was bluffing. Surely, she was bluffing.  
  
“I’m going to count to three. One.”  
  
“Miss Potter, I—”  
  
“Two.”  
  
“Alright, alright!” He raised his hands near his face and stepped past her. He walked to the door and opened it, but he turned to look at her before closing it. “I’ll come here tomorrow at—”  
  
But before he could finish she flicked her wand and the door slammed on his nose. 


	2. The One with the Fight at The Blue Moon

***

The Portkey Office was chaotic and the queue was monstrous. There were people asking for Portkeys for every part of England, Europe, Asia, and America. A young woman was asking insistently for a Portkey for Querobamba, and the Ministry employee kept asking her where exactly in the Andes that was because he couldn’t find it on any map.  
  
Scorpius looked at the clock on the wall. It was ten o’clock and Miss Potter was nowhere to be found. Could it be that she had failed to remember her appointment? Of course, she had probably forgotten all about it. Maybe all that incense had gone to her head and she was lying on the floor of her flat, giggling and waving her hand in front of her, with pillows under her head, and for all he knew maybe she was naked too, because Merlin only knew where those spices came from; maybe they were hallucinogens. Or maybe she was on the floor with that Dave from downstairs and they were—  
  
He shook his head. Dave was probably still crying himself to sleep and blowing bats out of his nose. Miss Potter was surely out there somewhere, putting her life into danger without him.  
  
Scorpius tapped his fingers nervously on the wall where he was leaning as he waited for the Head Auror’s daughter to arrive. But an hour passed and she didn’t come. Scorpius was starting to believe that she had left that note amongst her others just for him to find.  
  
But she couldn’t be that shrewd.  
  
“Excuse me,” he grunted, making his way towards the window where an employee was issuing a Portkey permit for a family of four. He ignored the other people’s glares and complaints as he knocked on the window. “Excuse me,” he said, “I need a piece of information.”  
  
“You need to wait in the queue with the others,” pointed out the employee.  
  
“I’m an Auror,” he snapped, “and I only need to know if you had an appointment scheduled for Miss Lily Luna Potter at ten this morning.”  
  
The man rolled his eyes before looking down on his desk. “Yes, we had an appointment with her.”  
  
“What did she want?”  
  
The man cocked an eyebrow. “A Portkey?” he asked back, gesturing around himself. “It’s the Portkey Office, in case you haven’t noticed.”  
  
Scorpius flushed. “I meant for where and when,” he snapped.  
  
“That’s private information.”  
  
Scorpius took a deep breath. “Well, she didn’t show up. Did she reschedule?”  
  
The man looked at him as if he was out of his mind. “Of course she showed up.”  
  
“That’s impossible. I’ve been waiting here for over an hour,” grunted Scorpius.  
  
“Well, you’ve been standing in the wrong place, Auror.” He nodded towards a corridor at Scorpius’ back. “She had an appointment with the Head of the Department, Mr Percy Weasley, in his office.”  
  
Scorpius groaned out loud. “What? Why?”  
  
“Personal matters,” replied the employee. “Now, if you’d excuse me, you’re not the only one who has to work here.”  
  
Scorpius was elbowed in his ribs by an old lady who needed a Portkey to go and see her daughter in Aberdeen, and he didn’t even bother complaining as he stepped back and massaged his stomach.  
  
He cast an askew glance at Percy Weasley’s office and decided that it was worth trying to get some information from the Head of the Department. And if Miss Potter was still there, surely she wouldn’t have used that fabled hex of hers on an Auror at the Ministry.  
  
He knocked on the door and almost didn’t have to wait, for a reply came as soon as his knuckles touched the wood. He pushed the door open and peered inside.  
  
“Yes?” asked Percy Weasley, without looking up from his desk.  
  
Damn! He was alone already.  
  
“Sir,” called Scorpius, “I’m looking for Miss Potter.”  
  
The man looked up at once, his blue eyes wide behind his horned-rimmed glasses. “Ah, of course,” he said, gesturing for him to come in. “You’re Auror Malfoy, aren’t you? She ranted about you for a good twenty minutes. You’ve really wound her up.”  
  
Scorpius gave him a tight lipped smile. “I’m just doing my job,” he replied. “I need to know why she needs a Portkey, Mr Weasley.”  
  
“That’s private information,” he replied. “What I can tell you is that I didn’t issue her one.” He sighed as he leant back against his chair. “Of course, she threatened to create one herself if I don’t help her, but she had some documents missing, and I can’t help her until she manages to obtain them.”  
  
Scorpius nodded. The fact that she would go around and create Portkeys herself didn’t reassure him in the least.  
  
“She probably won’t do it, though,” continued Mr Weasley as if reading his mind. “She knows that a faulty Portkey might be fatal for whoever uses it.”  
  
Scorpius nodded again. “Right,” he replied, “and she’s gone already, isn’t she?”  
  
Percy Weasley nodded back, before a smile stretched his thin lips. “Diagon Alley, I think she mentioned,” he told him, “she needed some things from Madam Malkin’s.” He took a deep breath and added, “You didn’t hear it from me.”  
  
“Thank you, Sir,” he told him, walking back towards the door.  
  
“Malfoy.” Mr Weasley waited for Scorpius to turn before he continued, “She’s not that bad when you get to know her.”  
  
Scorpius gave him the hint of a smile, he didn’t really want to know her in the least at that moment.  
  
***  
  
To Scorpius’ surprise, Lily Luna Potter had a variety of clothes that he wouldn’t have expected to see in her arms when she approached the counter at Madam Malkin’s.  
  
From his place behind a rack filled with cloaks, he could see her pay for two baby vests and a green dress as well as for a bib. Well, that was quite weird. He didn’t know that the Head Auror was already a grandfather. Nor there seemed to be signs of babies living in Miss Potter’s flat.  
  
He swallowed. Was she pregnant? That would explain her temper probably. Was that twat of a caretaker the father? Somewhat unexpectedly, Scorpius felt rather cross with Miss Potter. As if he had imagined her to be smarter than that.  
  
He blinked when he noticed that she was not there anymore. He pushed away the cloaks and hurried outside into the street. Madam Malkin’s irritated complaints of the mess he had made echoed vaguely in his ears, but he didn’t have time to apologise.  
  
Luckily, Miss Potter was there, shaking her mane of dreadlocks left and right as she advanced into the street under the sun. He followed a few steps behind her. She stopped in front of Flourish and Blotts to look at some books before walking inside a little food shop, half-hidden amongst the buildings.  
  
Scorpius looked at her from behind an issue of the Daily Prophet. She bought things that he didn’t even recognise, some sort of seeds and cereals. And milk. A lot of milk. Didn’t she know that if she was pregnant she had to eat a bit more than those probably exotic and very healthy things? Meat and fish and eggs would have been more suitable for her in her state. He promised himself to lecture her, the moment she let him talk long enough.  
  
He raised the newspaper when she walked out with paper bags in her arms. How stupid was she? If only he didn’t have to follow her from a distance. He would have helped her with all those things.  
  
She walked back towards Madam Malkin’s and stopped at Florean Fortescue’s to have a small ice-cream cone, before crossing the street and finally entering her building.  
  
He waited for a couple of minutes before he followed her inside. He expected to find the caretaker in tears for something she had told him, but there was nobody there. There were only her bags in a corner and her ice-cream in a rubbish bin at the entrance.  
  
He furrowed his brow, but before he could understand what was going on, he found himself with his back against the wall and a wand pressed against his throat.  
  
“You’re following me.” Miss Potter’s voice was even. Her big brown eyes fixed on him. “You’re really stubborn.”  
  
He gritted his teeth as he looked down at that little girl keeping in a position of disadvantage. “Look who’s talking,” he growled.  
  
“I’m going to kill Uncle Percy,” she said evenly.  
  
“He didn’t tell me anything,” replied Scorpius a bit too quickly. He didn’t have any difficulty believing that Miss Potter would kill her uncle just because he had told him where to find her.  
  
“Yes, right,” she replied calmly, before pushing the wand against Scorpius’ windpipe and cocking an eyebrow. “Listen, I swear to Merlin that if you keep following me, I’ll show you that improved version of my Bat-Bogey Hex I told you about.”  
  
Scorpius swallowed against the wand, which was pushing in his throat. “ I understand that in your situation you are… cranky. But I don’t think that you should go around lifting heavy weights and walking in the sun and putting yourself and your child in danger, okay?”  
  
She narrowed her eyes. “Beg your pardon?” she asked, raising her chin.  
  
“Come on, Miss Potter, I’ve seen what you bought,” he told her in a whisper. “Listen, if you’re having problems telling your family, I can assure you that your father—even though he is kind of scary at times—is really not a bad—”  
  
“I’m not pregnant, you idiot!” she grunted. She lowered her wand and shook her head, before grabbing her shopping bags and turning to look at him. “Stay away from me,” she snapped, “I’m going to hex you next time I see you at less than ten feet from me.”  
  
She purposefully stomped her feet as loudly as possible on the stairs as she climbed them.  
  
***  
  
Scorpius sat at Florean Fortescue’s with a half-finished and half-melt cup of ice-cream in front of him. He had been sitting there since that very morning, when Miss Potter had told him to get lost. Naturally, since he was just as stubborn as she was, there was no way for her to get rid of him that easily.  
  
So, after he had confirmed with Dave – who was luckily quite spineless – that the building had Anti-Apparition Wards in place, he sat there and stared at the entrance, waiting for Miss Potter to come out and for him to finally have an opportunity to follow her again.  
  
But Miss Potter didn’t leave the building the whole afternoon. The sky had painted of all the colours of sunset, and those too were gone now, and the stars were shining as bright as they possibly could in a night with the moon almost full.  
  
Ernie Macmillan, who had owned the shop for the past twenty years, kept looking at him and saying that he was keeping the parlour open so late just because he was an Auror, and he didn’t want to have any problems with the law, and oh Merlin! Had he heard that Harry Potter’s daughter was working on quite the case? And wasn’t she a pretty girl? What with her button nose and freckles. And she was such a sweet, sweet thing too…  
  
Scorpius looked at him as if he was completely out of his mind. And honestly, he probably was. Who in his right mind could ever call that demonic girl a sweet, sweet thing? Bloody hell, Hufflepuffs were weird.  
  
“And there she goes,” he told Scorpius suddenly, nodding towards the street. “Like every evening. Out to dance, I suspect. But she is quite pretty, isn’t she? I’m sure she has a boyfriend somewhere. Sometimes she comes home with someone who doesn’t leave until the following morning, if you know what I mean.” He winked, and Scorpius knew perfectly well what he meant.  
  
“Thank you for the ice-cream,” he said rather curtly, tossing some coins on the table. “And for keeping the shop open for me.”  
  
Mr Macmillan thanked him back and seemed to hurry to close his ice-cream parlour the moment Scorpius stood up and started following Miss Potter. He didn’t pay him too much attention.  
  
Instead, he focused on not getting caught as embarrassingly easily as that morning. At least now it was evening, and even though the street was deserted, it was way darker and she wouldn’t be able to look at his reflection in one of the window shops like she surely had that morning. Of course, that bloody moon was lightening the place as if it were day, almost, but still…  
  
He stopped when Miss Potter stopped a few yards ahead of him. She seemed to open her big bag and rummage through it for a moment, then she took a deep breath and kept walking and Scorpius with her.  
  
She was wearing the green dress that he had seen her buying that morning. It was rather on the short side, if he had to be completely honest. He wondered how she could go around without shivering to death. His own skin was covered in goose bumps as he stared at her round bottom swinging under the dress. He raised his eyes on her head. Her dreadlocks were really not that bad now that he looked at them bumping against the small of her back. But honestly, that was not a bag to bring to a club; it was way too voluminous to go dancing with. Which was really quite suspicious, because that dress and those high-heeled shoes she was wearing screamed  _party_  at the top of their lungs.  
  
She crossed the street and walked briskly into a side alley where a crooked sign indicated the way to take to get to Knockturn Alley. Scorpius swallowed as he grasped his wand almost spasmodically. It wasn’t the first time that he had to protect someone, but the other times people usually locked themselves in their houses, and were scared to even look out of the window. This was the first time that one of the people that he had to protect walked about in Knockturn Alley in a dress that would attract trouble even at Hogwarts.  
  
She stopped and turned a little and Scorpius dove behind a smelly rubbish bin abandoned in the middle of the street. She didn’t seem to notice his presence though, because soon her heels were clicking on the rocks of the street once more.  
  
He emerged from behind the bin and kept following her down the street. Honestly, he didn’t really have to follow her; he knew where she was going. He knew that she would try to enter into The Blue Moon. It was the best known werewolf-run club in London and she was working on a piece on werewolves; what better place than that to get information about the beasts in question? And what better place than that to get killed? Honestly, any sensible human wouldn’t venture into a werewolf-run club the nights before a full moon. Blood was boiling, and claws were sharper than ever on those nights.  
  
And she just looked like she was walking happily towards her death.  
  
Bloody hell! She was reckless!  
  
The Blue Moon was a massive building situated near Borgin and Burkes, with all its windows obscured and an iron door that didn’t seem to have a handle. Miss Potter drew out her wand as she stood in front of it and tapped the metal three times. Scorpius slid against the wall of a shop and tried to hide behind the shadow of a barrel abandoned there.  
  
The door opened, and a brute who might have had giant blood running in his veins appeared on the threshold. His short, brown hair stuck to his head as if it were painted, and his black shirt was so tight around his muscled arms that it seemed ready to tear at every movement.  
  
When he lowered his eyes to look at Miss Potter, a feral smirk appeared on his face. He lowered his head and for a moment Scorpius almost bit through his tongue, thinking that he was about to kiss her.  
  
He didn’t do it. She tilted her head back and he sniffed her neck. In the light of the moon, Scorpius could see his eyelids fluttering as if in pleasure at the smell of the girl. One of his gigantic hands closed on her hip before descending on her arse and giving her a squeeze.  
  
Scorpius blinked as he found himself with his wand in his hand, but on the other side of the street, Miss Potter was already shoving the man off of her and he was laughing earthly at her outraged expression. Then he stepped back and she walked inside, the door closing at her back.  
  
Scorpius’ heart started beating at double pace against his sternum.  
  
Bloody sodding hell!  
  
Great, now she was in a club filled with werewolves – and Merlin knew what else – during one of the days preceding the full moon and all he could do to get to her was to go and knock on that freaking door. But of course, he was still in his uniform, and werewolves hated Aurors. The possibilities of him getting in there were more or less inexistent.  
  
The possibilities of him getting killed were another story…  
  
He wondered if Miss Potter would at least feel guilty if they found his lifeless body in Knockturn Alley.  
  
She would probably call him an idiot and shake her head.  
  
He took a deep breath as he finally crossed the street. He was an Auror for crying out loud! He was going to find a way inside. Even if he had to hex that giant of a bouncer at the door.  
  
He knocked like she had done and waited, trying to push his heart back in his chest at the meantime.  
  
When the door opened he blew up his chest and looked defiantly at the half-giant.  
  
“Yes?” the man asked coldly.  
  
“I need to get inside,” he told him, his voice steady.  
  
The man eyed his Auror badge and his uniform, before returning his gaze to Scorpius’ face. “Get out of my sight,” he growled, starting to close the door.  
  
Scorpius drew his wand and pointed it at the man. “I need to get inside,” he repeated dryly, “and if you don’t let me in, I’ll drag you all the way to the Ministry and have you arrested for standing in the way of an Auror investigation.”  
  
That was probably the wrong thing to say. But that man, for as big as he was, had no wand in his hand and he couldn’t do anything against a well-placed curse.  
  
“Get out of my sight, Auror,” he repeated in a grunt.  
  
“ _Stupefy_!”  
  
The spell hit the man right in his chest, and he blinked a couple of times and staggered back, but he didn’t fall or pass out cold as Scorpius had expected. He only seemed to look rather confused for a moment before he darkened and gritted his teeth, his eyes turning gold as he looked back at Scorpius. “You better start running,” he hissed, before jumping on him with his teeth bared and his nails ready to tear at his uniform.  
  
Scorpius fell back, his head hitting the stones as he tried to keep the man’s face at a distance from his neck. His wand rolled away from him and soon the man had his sharp claws tearing at his sides, until he could feel blood seeping through his clothes.  
  
The werewolf snapped his jaw and hissed, “You’re going to make a wonderful snack,” before hitting Scorpius’ head with his own.  
  
He heard a crack as he hit the ground behind his head. There were cries and magic that flew over their heads, but his ears were buzzing and his sight was blurred. Then someone was calling his name, but all he could do was close his eyes and let himself fall into oblivion.  
  
***  
  
“Scorpius.”  
  
Scorpius fluttered his eyelids in a vain attempt to open them, but his eyes hurt him and he didn’t want to open them just yet. The bed where he was lying was comfortable. It was like being at home. Yes, he felt like he was back at the Manor, there were pillows and a snug bed, and it was rather cold too. Just like the Manor.  
  
“Scorpius.”  
  
He tried to open his eyes again, but the world was all blurred and his head hurt him beyond words. Why did he have to wake up anyway?  
  
“Scorpius.”  
  
He grunted in reply. Was that Lily Luna Potter’s voice? He imagined her keeping vigil on his lying form on the bed. He imagined her crying, and holding his hand, and somehow those visions made him happy.  
  
“Scorpius, dear, how do you feel?”  
  
He managed to open one eye. “Mother?” he asked hoarsely.  
  
His mother nodded and smiled at him, her cold hands going to brush away his matted hair from his forehead.  
  
Well, so much for imagining a beautiful girl crying over him.  
  
He shook his head.  _Beautiful_? Where had that come from?  
  
He furrowed his brow to send away that thought, but now he felt guilty for being disappointed that that was his mother looking after him.  
  
“What happened?” he croaked, trying to sit up without really managing.  
  
His mother stuffed a couple of pillows behind his back to help him up. “Oh, I don’t know,” she replied, “but a pretty girl brought you here last night. You were covered in blood, but she said she’d healed you and when we called a Healer from St Mungo’s, he said she’d done a marvellous job.” She brushed his hair a bit more with her hand, as if he was a child. “You were lucky she was there.”  
  
“Where is she?” asked Scorpius feebly.  
  
“Oh, gone, and she didn’t say her name,” she replied. “She looked rather worried for you, though, and wouldn’t leave your side until you were comfortable in your bed.”  
  
Scorpius felt his cheeks go warm. “What did she look like?” he asked, even though he didn’t really have to.  
  
His mother smiled at him. “Red hair, lots of that, she wore it in a weird way though—”  
  
“Dreadlocks?” he supplied.  
  
“Oh, I guess that’s what those are called,” smiled his mother. “Fair skin, small, beautiful, beautiful nose covered in pretty freckles. That was the kind of nose I wanted. I should have snapped a picture for Healer Tuck to see.”  
  
Scorpius closed his eyes as groaned. Had he just been saved by the girl he was supposed to protect? Maybe she really didn’t need protection after all.  
  
“Who was she, Scorpius dear? You haven’t brought a girl home in years now. I think we should invited her over for tea.”  
  
Scorpius cracked an eye open. “Mother, she’s my job,” he replied weakly, pushing away the covers. “I need to go and see her.”  
  
“Scorpius, you’re too weak to get out of this bed,” she protested. “Darling, no! Go back to bed! Scorpius!”  
  
But he didn’t even look at her as he found his spare uniform and started to put it on.  
  
He needed to go and talk to Miss Potter.  
  
Whatever she had mixed herself with, it was nothing good.  
  
***  
  
She was not home. Naturally.  
  
And she wasn’t even at the newsroom.  
  
But Mr Quills seemed to know everything about the events of the night and he of course tried to ask Scorpius as many questions as possible to stick an article on the first page of the evening issue.  
  
“Absolutely no,” replied Scorpius dryly. “Tell me where I can find Miss Potter instead.”  
  
Mr Quills desisted easily, maybe scared of what Miss Potter would do to him if she was to know that the happenings from the night before would become of public domain. “She had an appointment at the International Magical Office of Law,” he finally replied, checking his watch. “Right about now, actually. Don’t ask me why, I have no clue.”  
  
“Aren’t you her boss?” asked Scorpius exasperatedly.  
  
He cocked an eyebrow at him, unimpressed. “She writes beautifully, but she’s impossible. I trust her, I don’t ask questions and she doesn’t hex me like she does with her brothers.”  
  
Scorpius couldn’t help but agree with that. “Right, thank you for the information.”  
  
“My pleasure,” replied the editor. “Maybe you’ll consider giving an interview when the case is closed. I’m sure it’d get you the first page, and—”  
  
Scorpius didn’t even wait for him to stop talking before he walked out of the newsroom.  
  
***  
  
Scorpius was starting to feel rather frustrated at the situation. His head still hurt and he felt tired. Miss Potter had already left the Ministry and the more he ran behind her, the more he felt like she was able to leave him behind. He imagined she was sneering at him right at this moment.  
  
And to top that, the employees at the International Magical Office would not divulge any information. Not even to him, who was an Auror. Who was investigating on a freaking case. No, he wasn’t investigating, or better he shouldn’t have been investigating; he should have been sitting somewhere with a very scared Miss Potter, chatting, getting to know her, maybe brushing his fingers a bit over that skin that seemed rather smooth indeed…  
  
He stopped and shook his head, only to notice that it hurt him even more than before. It was 30% the fall and 70% Miss Potter’s fault.  
  
For a moment he thought of going to Teddy and telling him that he didn’t want the job anymore, that the Head Auror should come back from France to look after his daughter, or Teddy could do it himself, or the brother she hadn’t already hexed. See how long they lasted before they arrested her and sent her to Azkaban to keep her safe.  
  
He took a deep breath as he made his way back to the Atrium. No, he would have gone to talk to her, thanked her for saving his life, and then told her that she had to kill him if she wanted to get rid of him. Or maybe he shouldn’t tell her that, after all she surely wouldn’t think twice about murdering him and hiding the body.  
  
He dunked his hand into the Floo Powder and grabbed a generous amount. He wished Miss Potter’s fireplace was linked to the Floo, but it didn’t matter. He stepped into the hearth and said, “Diagon Alley” loud and clear, and then was gone amongst green flames.  
  
***  
  
Scorpius’ knock on Miss Potter’s door was firm and loud. Even if she were standing on the other side of the flat she would have heard it. He straightened his back and smoothed his uniform, before bringing a hand to his head and ruffling up his hair a little. He hated that, but the last thing he wanted was for Miss Potter to make fun of him or question his sexual preferences because of his hair.  
  
He waited a good five minutes before he decided that it was worth knocking again. And then he had to wait another five minutes before he tried knocking for the third time.  
  
“I’m coming, for Merlin’s beard!” He heard from the other side of the door and even though her voice was as gruff as always, he felt a jolt in his chest as she spoke.  
  
He bit his bottom lip. Why was he nervous to talk to her? He shouldn’t have been; he was just going to say, “Thank you”, and “I’m not letting you out of my sight again”, and that was all.  
  
He didn’t hear any steps nearing and he was about to knock a fourth time when the door opened enough to let Miss Potter’s red mane of dreadlocks peer outside.  
  
For a moment she looked at him and for a moment she didn’t seem angry or ready to tear the skin of his face with her bare nails. For a moment something flicked in her eyes and she looked almost relieved to see him alive.  
  
Or maybe he just imagined that, because it was really a moment before she smirked and opened the door wide to let him in.  
  
Well, at least she was letting him in.  _Maybe just to kill me privately and then dispose of my body…_  
  
Scorpius stepped inside and turned to look at her as she closed the door at his back. He froze in the motion.  
  
Her dreadlocks were pulled up over her head in a massive pony tail, and the extremities were dripping water over her naked shoulders, down her cleavage, and inside that short towel that she had wrapped around her body. She was quite tanned, now that Scorpius had a close look at her skin. She wasn’t as fair as he had first thought; surely she was very tan for a ginger. And when he couldn’t see tan lines anywhere on the top of her breasts, he imagined that she’d had to lie on some tropical beach under the sun in the nude. He swallowed at that thought and tore his eyes from her chest to find her eyebrow cocked and her lips pursed in an annoyed expression.  
  
“Miss Potter,” he croaked out a bit hoarsely, “I’m here to thank you for last night. For saving me.”  
  
She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “I told you not to follow me,” she replied coldly, “I don’t have time to baby-sit you.”  
  
He flared his nostrils as a rage rose in the pit of his stomach. So much for civility. “Miss Potter, I hardly think that—”  
  
“Stop calling me that, bloody hell!” she exclaimed, cutting him off. “Miss Potter, Miss Potter, Miss Potter. Merlin, nobody calls me Miss Potter. Can’t you even hear how ridiculous that sounds? My name is Lily. Li-ly, can you say it?”  
  
Scorpius gritted his teeth at her tone. “Lily,” he bit out, giving her a tight-lipped smile, “I’m just trying to say—”  
  
“Listen, I’m glad you’re safe and sound, but I really don’t have time. I need to get changed and go out,” she told him, as she played with the hem of the towel. “And be home before the moon is up.” She turned on her heels and strode into the bedroom, and without even bothering to close the door she let the towel fall to the floor and started looking for her clothes.  
  
Scorpius had to gather as much strength as possible to look away from her. He walked closer to the door and leant against the wall. “I’m coming with you,” he said firmly, staring at the floor.  
  
“No, you’re not,” she replied in a sing-song voice. “You don’t know anything about werewolf etiquette or how to bring one down.”  
  
Scorpius swallowed. “And you know everything,” he snapped, “I saw it, letting them touch you and sniff your neck. They could break your windpipe with a snap of their jaw if they wanted.”  
  
“They smell my scent,” she told him from her bedroom, her voice muffled by some sort of piece of material. “They know me. I trust them and they trust me.” She appeared on the door once again and smoothed a short yellow dress over her thighs. “And the same thing cannot be said about Aurors; they hate them with a passion. Especially after the last bunch of laws that the Ministry passed.” She grabbed her big bag and stuffed some random things inside.  
  
“I don’t care,” replied Scorpius firmly. “I’m coming with you. You are my job.”  
  
She snorted and didn’t even turn to look at him. “Aren’t you romantic?” She opened her door and waited for him to follow her outside. When he did, she closed and locked the door. “Look, I do appreciate your attempts to keep me alive by trying to kill yourself, it’s just that I don’t have time to stop my friends from murdering you every night. Especially not these nights. The pull of the moon is strong, you know. If yesterday I could push Brutus off of you, I’m not quite sure I’d manage tonight.”  
  
Scorpius shook his head vehemently. “I don’t need your help,” he lied. “But you do, whatever you are working on, it’s dangerous, and you need to trust me and let me help you. I’m here for that.”  
  
She nodded at Dave’s direction as they passed him, and the caretaker followed them with his eyes filled with envy.  
  
Once they were standing in the street, she turned towards Scorpius and shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she told him evenly, “you better go to your Manor now, Malfoy; it’s not a game I’m playing here.”  
  
Scorpius narrowed his eyes and the moment she Disapparated with a smirk, he followed her suit with a loud pop.  
  
When he Apparated again he was standing in front of The Blue Moon and she was looking outraged at him from the other side of the street. He could almost see her nostrils flare under the last rays of the sun as she crossed Knockturn Alley to get to him.  
  
“You’re crazy!” she whispered urgently. “Go home, Auror! You’re going to get killed and I’m not the one who’ll save you again tonight.” She made to walk past him, but he grabbed her arm.  
  
“I’m not going anywhere without you!” he hissed, tugging at her arm. “If you’re going in there I’m coming with you, and if they kill me it’ll be on your conscience.”  
  
“You’re an idiot!” she snapped, wriggling her arm to try and free herself from his nimble fingers without managing. “You don’t know what you are asking. If they want to kill you, I won’t…” Her words trailed away as she stared at a point over Scorpius’ shoulder. She went incredibly still and pressed her lips together in a thin line.  
  
Scorpius furrowed his brow as he brought his hand to his wand in an instinctive movement. “What?” he asked, turning to look at his back. Knockturn Alley was silent and empty around them.  
  
“Werewolves,” she breathed in a whisper. She drew her wand as well and took a step back as she checked how far they were from the building behind her.  
  
“Well, you’re their friend, aren’t you?”  
  
Something moved in the shadows near Borgin and Burkes.  
  
She shook her head as she grabbed his forearm and took another step back, dragging him with her. “No,” she whispered, “those are Greys, not Browns.” She moved closer to him, until her breast was pushing against his arm. He tried to shove at the back of his brain the fact that there was some sort of tingly sensation spreading in his lower abdomen. “We need to get to The Blue Moon.”  
  
“No,” he replied, “let’s Disapparate.”  
  
She shook her head, her hand slackening a bit on his arm as if she was afraid he would pull her in a side-along Apparition. “I can’t, I need to get inside. They need me.”  
  
Scorpius tried to reach for her with his hand, but one of the shadows that was lurking near the dodgy shop, emerged from the darkness. He was tall, with broad shoulders and eyes of coal. His bare arms were covered in hair and so was the part of his chest visible from under the shirt. He smelled the air as if he was a dog and smirked at them.  
  
“You smell delicious, Little Red,” he growled, “I want to taste every inch of you.” His eyes darted to Scorpius for a moment. “And you smell like a snack.” He smirked at them and three different laughs echoed his words at his back.  
  
“Go away,” snarled Lily, from next to Scorpius, “I told you, Hans, I have used an Unforgivable Curse before, I’m not scared to use it again.”  
  
“Oh, I do love when you bluff like that, Little Red,” the werewolf growled, “it makes me believe that you’ll actually be able to put up a fight, instead of snapping under my fingers like a twig.” He looked pointedly at Lily. “I want to make you one of us,” he growled, “I want to bite your tender flesh and fill my mouth with your blood. And then I want to mate you under the full moon and pup you.” He laughed at his own words. “Right after you’ve given me the baby, Little Red.”  
  
Scorpius could hear Lily grit her teeth next to him. “You’ll have to kill me if you want the baby,” she hissed.  
  
“That can be arranged,” hissed a much thinner werewolf at Hans’ back. His smirk wasn’t any less cruel than the one of the other man. “How would you like to go? I can get very creative.”  
  
Hans growled and snapped his jaw at him. “She’s mine, Karl,” he grunted, “all mine.”  
  
Lily’s breath hitched as she pressed herself closer to Scorpius. “On the count of three,” she whispered.  
  
Scorpius turned to cast her a quick glance. “On the count of three what?” he asked frantically.  
  
“Fire,” she breathed. “One.”  
  
The other two werewolves who were still in the shadows advanced to where their leader was standing, their teeth bared and eyes shining in the evening that was turning into night.  
  
“Two,” whispered Lily.  
  
They bounced on their feet as if they were ready to sprint towards them.  
  
“Three,” she said the moment the werewolves started running towards them.  
  
“ _Sectumsempra_!” Scorpius cried, pointing his wand at the bigger of them.  
  
“Expecto Patronum!” screamed Lily unexpectedly. A silver rabbit hopped out from her wand and ran towards the building. Scorpius had just the time to see it disappear under the door before he was throwing more hexes and curses towards the werewolves. He knew that they were stronger than normal humans, but they seemed almost immune to magic. Yes, his spells slowed them down, but they were still advancing and if those people in the building didn’t open the door for them they would soon find themselves with their backs against the wall.  
  
“ _Crucio_!” snarled Lily suddenly. A soft red light fell on the ground in front of them and Hans started to sneer at her.  
  
“Told you, Little Red,” he growled, “you don’t know what you’re doing.” With a jolt of his muscles, he jumped forward to reach them.  
  
“No!” screamed Lily, stepping back once more.  
  
“ _Stupefy_!” cried Scorpius as he came to stand in front of her. He raised his wand to the leader’s head. “ _Reducto_!” he snarled.  
  
The werewolf snarled with his teeth bared as he ducked and ran towards them.  
  
“ _Stupefy_!” cried Lily, and Scorpius could hear the fear in her voice. Why weren’t her friends opening the door?  
  
“ _Sectumsempra_!” tried Scorpius once more, but the werewolf grabbed his arm as he dodged the spell and threw him to the ground before he could fire another hex. Scorpius held onto his wand and had just enough time to look as she werewolf pounced himself at Lily before another two were on him.  
  
But they weren’t as big and as the one who was pinning Lily to the ground at this very moment, and he pointed his wand to one’s chest as he kicked the other square in the jaw. “ _Stupefy_!” he cried, and this time the werewolf was pushed back by the force of the spell.  
  
Then there was a scream that tore the silence of the street and a cruel laugh that followed that. Scorpius had just the time to fend off the third werewolf’s attack with a Full Body-Bind Curse sent from inches of distance, when he turned towards Lily and Hans.  
  
She was lying on the ground, pale as the moon. Her pretty, yellow dress was torn on her side and the material was blushing with her blood. The same blood was dripping from the mouth of the werewolf as he snarled a smirk at Scorpius. “Delicious as always,” he hissed, licking his lips.  
  
“No!” cried Scorpius, throwing himself at his neck. He managed to effectively send the werewolf to the ground, but he was still howling a nasty laughter as Scorpius tried to punch him. Hans grasped his arm and squeezed until his bones creaked.  
  
The other three werewolves advanced towards them, Scorpius’ magic already fading from their bodies. They closed around them, keeping the distance from Lily’s whimpering body in sign of respect to their leader probably. Scorpius pushed his wand into his neck. “ _Avada_ —”  
  
His Unforgivable Curse was cut short by a howl that bounced on the walls of the buildings of the street. Then Scorpius had just the time to see Hans’ eyes going wide as he threw him to the ground and pushed himself upright.  
  
Scorpius crawled to where Lily was lying. There were bite-marks on her side, the same side where she’d already been bitten, and her hands were pushing against the wound to keep the blood from overflow from her body. Scorpius pushed his hands against the wound as well. “You’re going to be okay,” he said mechanically, “you’re going to be okay.”  
  
She blinked at him, her rosy cheeks completely white now, she tried to open her mouth to say something, but she didn’t seem able to speak.  
  
Then a shadow advanced towards them and Scorpius tried to locate his wand on the ground, but when there was a low growl, he raised his eyes to look at the person standing there. It was a woman. She had long, blonde hair, her beautiful face was marked with many scars and she was baring her teeth to the four werewolves, and even though she was alone and much smaller than them, they seemed to step back and look rather scared of her.  
  
“My favourite bitch came out to protect her pup,” snarled Hans. “I can’t wait to take her away from you and taste her every night.”  
  
“Go away,” cried the woman, “go away or I’ll tear you apart and send him your heads as a present.”  
  
“He just wants what’s his,” hissed the thinner werewolf. “We all do.”  
  
“He is not yours,” snarled the woman, “go away or I swear, there’ll be a blood bath here tonight.”  
  
“Smell her,” hissed Hans, “her blood is too delicious… so close to the moon… not even your well behaved dogs will be able to keep away from her.”  
  
The woman snapped her jaws like a wolf. “Go away,” she screamed.  
  
Two of the werewolves stepped back at her tone, and even Hans seemed to quiver a little. Who was that woman?  
  
Then there was a creak from the door, as if it was going to open and more people would come out, and all four werewolves yelped slightly.  
  
“It doesn’t end here,” snarled Hans as he started to step back.  
  
The woman just howled and finally the werewolves ran away.  
  
Lily gasped slightly and Scorpius looked back at her. “Lily,” he whispered urgently, “bloody hell. Don’t… don’t die…”  
  
The woman knelt next to them and looked down at Lily with concern. She growled as she stared at the wound. “He’ll pay for that, Lily,” she murmured, caressing Lily’s hair.  
  
“We need to take her inside!” whispered Scorpius urgently.  
  
The woman finally looked at him. “No, we can’t,” she replied, “Hans is right. It’s the full moon tomorrow, and they won’t be able to keep away from her. You need to take her home.”  
  
“St Mungo’s you mean!” gasped Scorpius.  
  
“No, don’t bring her there now,” replied the woman forcefully. She drew out her wand and pointed it to Lily’s side. She muttered an incantation and Lily gasped again as the blood stopped flowing through Scorpius’ fingers. She Summoned their wands and handed them to Scorpius. “Is that her bag?” she asked calmly as she stood up.  
  
“Yes, but—”  
  
“Take her home,” repeated the woman. “Put her to bed. Make her rest. We need her.” She threw her bag over her shoulder. “Don’t come back tomorrow night, come during day time.”  
  
“But—”  
  
“Take her now!” snapped the woman. “Make her fall asleep, but don’t let her faint.” She stood up and looked towards the place where the werewolves had disappeared. “They knew she was coming,” she muttered, “someone must be playing tricks.” She turned to look at Scorpius and added, “Go now!”  
  
Scorpius nodded without adding a word. He slipped an arm under her back and one under her knees and stood from the ground with Lily in his arms. He cast one last glance at the woman as she nodded back at him and he finally Disapparated.  
  
When he Apparated again he was standing in front of her building. He looked down at Lily: her eyes were closed and her lips were as white as the teeth visible between them. He remembered what the woman had told him and hoped fervently that she hadn’t fainted.  
  
He started walking briskly towards the building and was glad when Dave was nowhere to be found. He hurried up the stairs, thanking God for the minute constitution of the girl. He fumbled with the key as he leant her weight against his chest before he could manage to open the door.  
  
He sealed it close when he finally made his way inside, and he was now happy to remember that the place had no Floo. He crossed the little flat and reached the bedroom. Lily was breathing raggedly against his chest, her eyes were contoured with deep purple rings and she was as white as a ghost. He laid her down on her bed and looked at her with fear gripping his insides.  
  
She couldn’t die. She was his job. His boss’ daughter. No, she was too young and pretty and full of life to die. Not now. She couldn’t. She couldn’t die.  
  
He sat next to her and placed one of his big, calloused hands on her forehead. She was matted with sweat. “Lily,” he said. “Lily, wake up.”  
  
She didn’t move.  
  
He gritted his teeth as he grabbed her upper arm and shook her. “Lily, wake up!” he said louder. “Lily!”  
  
She whimpered slightly and her eyelids fluttered as she murmured something.  
  
“What?” he asked, lowering his head until his ear was near her mouth.  
  
“Scorp-pius,” she breathed. “Tired…”  
  
He took a deep breath. “Yes, yes,” he assured her, “sleep. Sleep as much as you need.” He raised his head and kissed her forehead without thinking. He furrowed his brow at his own gesture, but it was the spur of the moment. He Summoned a blanket and covered her, and she fell asleep before he could even tuck her in. 


	3. The One with the Child

***

When Scorpius woke up, the first thing he noticed was that his back ached. Of course, the battered armchair where he had spent the night was probably the least comfortable piece of furniture in that flat.  
  
The second thing he noticed was that Lily Luna Potter was awake and was staring at him from the bed.  
  
He rubbed a hand over his face and looked back at her. “Morning,” he said softly.  
  
She blinked at him. “You saved me,” she told him simply.  
  
He wanted to reply with a cocky  _I know, baby_ , or maybe a more sober,  _Now we’re even_ , but instead he croaked out a pathetic, “I didn’t, that woman saved you.”  
  
Lily stared at him before replying. “No,” she murmured, “I remember. You threw yourself at Hans.” She took a deep breath and added, “Quite stupidly, if you ask me.”  
  
“Hey, I—”  
  
“Thank you,” she told him softly.  
  
He felt his cheeks become hotter. “It’s alright,” he replied. “I… I was just doing my job.”  
  
She nodded, pushed back the blanket and raised her dress up to right under her breasts. Even her blue knickers were tainted with blood and her side was covered in red. “Great,” she groaned, “Mum and Dad will have a heart attack next time we go to the beach together.”  
  
Scorpius blinked at her words. “What?” he snorted. “Is that all you care about?”  
  
She looked at him. “What else?”  
  
“You’ve just been bitten by a werewolf close to the full moon, you might… you might…”  
  
She shook her head as she sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. “I’m fine,” she told him, “he didn’t transform. I’ve already been bitten once anyway.” She pushed her hands on the bed and stood up, staggering on her legs.  
  
Scorpius was to his feet and next to her before she could fall back on the bed. He grasped her waist to steady her and looked down at her. “Where are you going?” he asked softly.  
  
She whimpered slightly and he moved his hands south, until the smooth curve of her hipbone was resting against his palm. He had to fight the desire to circle it with his thumb. “I’m going to take a shower,” she told him simply. “I need to get ready for this evening, and—”  
  
“The woman said that you should go there during day time,” he told her seriously, “I say that you shouldn’t go there at all, though.”  
  
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she murmured. She pushed back from his chest, only to teeter a bit and have to grasp his upper arms for support. “I need to go back.”  
  
“Why?” asked Scorpius forcefully. “What’s going on? What do those Greys want? A baby? Whose baby? What’s happening?”  
  
She bit her bottom lip as she lowered her eyes. “I can’t tell you,” she finally admitted.  
  
Scorpius took a deep breath. “Lily, if you want me to—”  
  
“I can’t tell you,” she repeated, “but I can show you… Unless you’re scared to go into The Blue Moon after these past two nights.”  
  
He snorted. “I’m not scared of anything,” he replied in a huff.  
  
She gave him a small smile that made him melt a little inside. “Then I need to take a shower and change, and then we need to go and buy some milk and baby food, and then we should go.”  
  
“Back to the club?” he asked her in a groan.  
  
She nodded seriously. “Yes,” she replied, “you don’t have to come though. It’s daytime, nothing will—”  
  
“Except it’s Knockturn Alley and you look like you’re about to faint at any moment,” he finally found the perfect moment to cut her off himself.  
  
She lowered her eyes, and he thought she felt ashamed. She didn’t. “There’s a Blood Replenishing Potion in the kitchen. Can you get me something for the pain as well?” she asked almost in a business-like tone of voice.  
  
Scorpius’ shoulders dropped a little. For a moment he thought he might have convinced her to stay in, just for the day. Of course, that would have made his job hundreds of times easier, but it was not only for that… “Okay,” he reluctantly agreed. He let her go and waited for her to manage to keep herself upright without stumbling back on the bed before heading for the kitchen.  
  
“Wait,” she called him as he circled the bed. “Help me out of this, will you?”  
  
When he turned, she was looking at him as if she had just asked him to take off her shoes because she couldn’t reach them. But her arms outstretched over her head didn’t really let him consider too many options as to what she was asking.  
  
“Out… out of the dress?” he asked, trying to keep his blush at bay.  
  
She nodded in a matter-of-fact way. “I certainly can’t take a shower with my clothes on,” she pointed out.  
  
Scorpius nodded dumbly. “No, yeah, no… You… you’d drown…” He wasn’t sure she’d drown in a shower, really. “I… you go into the bathroom and… and I’ll go and find my wand… it must be there in the living room… and I’ll just—”  
  
“Come here,” she told him almost amusedly.  
  
“I… yes… you need help to reach the bathroom?” He walked back to where she was standing and tried to smile reassuring at her, but somehow he had lost control of his facial muscles.  
  
“Grab the hem of the dress.”  
  
“I don’t think—”  
  
“Just do it,” she told him. “Good. Now make it slide up my body.”  
  
“Miss Potter—”  
  
“Lily.”  
  
“Lily, I don’t think I should—”  
  
“I won’t tell anybody,” she reassured him with a wink. “You’ve already seen a naked woman, haven’t you?”  
  
He looked at her outraged. “Yes, of course,” he grunted.  
  
“Good,” she replied, “make it slide up. Don’t be too rough, I think it might be stuck to the dried blood and I’m not really looking forward to more pain.”  
  
He fidgeted with the dress around her thighs. “That’s why Vanishing it would be more effective,” he told her seriously, “and less painful.”  
  
“Just do it,” she repeated. She looked up at him and he fixed his eyes into hers, paying attention not to make his glance wander down her body.  
  
She hissed in pain when he had to tug the material from her side. “Sorry,” he mumbled.  
  
“’S alright,” she murmured.  
  
Then he reached her breasts, and of course, she did not have a bra. Not that she needed one; they looked perky and soft and fleshy and smooth and perfect. Not that he was looking. No. Just out of the corner of his eye really, just because they were there and now that she raised her arms over her head a bit more they just pushed up towards him. And they were so inviting… he stretched his fingers a bit to slide them over her sides and she let out a soft giggle at the tickling sensation.  
  
He swallowed hard and pushed the dress hastily over her face to cover her amused expression, her giggling was successfully muffled by the material and he had to chew hard on his bottom lip to keep himself from looking at her chest.  
  
He threw the dress to the floor when he managed to disentangle it from her hands. And of course she wouldn’t go and cover her breasts and her pointy nipples.  
  
Instead, she pushed the already taunt skin of her waist to make it look even smoother. “Does it show?” she asked thoughtfully. “The wound, I mean.”  
  
Scorpius’ eyes skimmed over her chest and lowered to her blood-covered side. “Maybe after you wash it, it’ll show,” he replied in a murmur.  
  
She nodded in agreement and leant against his forearm as she dragged her knickers down her legs.  
  
Scorpius found the door over her shoulder particularly interesting as she stepped out of her underwear and made her way to the bathroom. She didn’t close the door and turned on the water.  
  
“I’ll get… get the potions… get the potions from the kitchen…”  
  
“Thank you,” she replied, without looking at him.  
  
“Yeah, no… no problem… no problem at all…” he mumbled as he made his way to the door.  
  
***  
  
She looked like a new person after her shower, and after she had downed the potions, and changed into her clean jeans and shirt. Not that Scorpius didn’t appreciate her going around naked and asking him if he thought that the swelling would diminish or if it was normal. But he was glad that she looked so much better than before now that she sat in front of him at her kitchen table. She almost beamed – well, okay, she didn’t beam, probably, she looked rather surprised though – for the fact that he had pushed a plate filled with pasta in front of her.  
  
“You cooked,” she stated, blinking in surprise.  
  
He shrugged a shoulder as he grated some parmesan on top of his plate. “Well, you can’t live on potions,” he replied, “you need to put something into your stomach if you want to—”  
  
“I didn’t think you could cook,” she cut him off simply, rolling her fork into the mountain of pasta and bringing a generous forkful to her mouth. Contrary to what he thought, she didn’t chew noisily, or with her mouth open. Au contraire: she looked particularly polite as she sat there with her back perfectly straight and her elbows close to her waist and her brown eyes fixed on him and her mouth slightly curved in a knowing smile.  
  
“What?” he asked, taken aback.  
  
“You were staring,” she chuckled.  
  
“No, I wasn’t,” he replied sourly. “Eat… eat your pasta, it’s good… is it good?”  
  
“Delicious,” she assured him.  
  
***  
  
He followed her– or better she let him follow her – around Diagon Alley for some errands. She needed more food, more baby food, baby clothes and other articles like little blankets and toys. They spent most of the afternoon walking from shop to shop, until she had to down another potion because her pain was acting up again.  
  
“You’re not going to tell me why you’re buying all these things, are you?” he asked her as he placed the umpteenth bag around his wrist.  
  
“No,” she replied calmly.  
  
He took a deep breath as he followed her into Florean Fortescue’s. “You know, after last night I thought that you’d at least—”  
  
“What flavours would you like?”  
  
He blinked at her. “What?”  
  
“Ice-cream,” she replied, nodding towards the sign. “What flavours.”  
  
He looked at the sign with all the flavours and blinked again. “Chocolate Frog and Treacle Tart,” he replied mechanically.  
  
She nodded and ordered two cones. She handed one to him and gave him a small smile as he thanked her. “But you can’t buy my silence with ice-cream,” he told her severely, “I think that if we want to avoid another—”  
  
“I’m not going to tell you,” she cut him off again – bloody hell, she drove him crazy! “I’m going to show you,” she added as she licked her ice-cream.  
  
***  
  
Despite the fact that the sun was still high in the sky, Knockturn Alley seemed to be enveloped into a thick foggy darkness. Scorpius imagined that the residents of that street liked to conduct their businesses in the shadows rather than the light, and that surely that condition was magic-induced rather than natural.  
  
He was walking next to Lily now, and not behind her, his side always brushing hers, as if he was afraid that something would happen to her if he wasn’t standing right next to her.  
  
But nothing happened. People glanced at them darkly from some dodgy corners, but nobody stopped them nor tried to talk to them. Lily made her way through the street as carelessly as if she was walking through the halls of Hogwarts. Only when they reached the door of The Blue Moon she turned to look at him. “Don’t be scared,” she told him, “everything will be fine.”  
  
He felt his cheeks go up in flames. “I’m not scared,” he replied, outraged. “I’m perfectly fine.”  
  
She chuckled as she knocked on the door.  
  
Scorpius swallowed thickly when the same mountain of a man who had jumped at his throat two nights before opened the door. The werewolf smirked at Lily, but when he glanced at Scorpius he snapped his jaws menacingly. “You,” he hissed.  
  
Scorpius’ finger closed around his wand, but Lily stepped between the two of them and placed a hand on the werewolf’s chest. “He’s with me, Brutus,” she told him seriously, “if you touch him, you’ll have to answer to me.”  
  
“Hey…” groaned Scorpius.  
  
The werewolf howled a laugh, raising his hands near his head. “As you wish, Lily,” he told her, looking up and down her body. “I’m not going to touch your boyfriend.” He sniggered and added, “Did he forbid you to wear your pretty little dresses to come and see me? He knows that I need to sniff you every now and then, doesn’t he?” He grabbed her arm, making her squirm, and pulled her to him. He dunked his nose into her hair and inhaled sharply.  
  
“Let her go!” snapped Scorpius, drawing out his wand.  
  
The werewolf laughed again, before giving her arse a good squeeze and pushing her inside. He stepped back and let Scorpius in too.  
  
Scorpius glared at him as he followed Lily. “Are you okay?” he asked her in a whisper.  
  
She nodded in reply, smoothing her shirt and starting to walk down a long corridor. The place was bare and dark. It was clean, Scorpius couldn’t see all the dirt and blood that he’d expected in a werewolf-run club, and there were many metallic, fortified doors that opened on the corridor.  
  
They walked past many of those, but didn’t see a living soul, and everything was calm and silent in there.  
  
“It’s the moon,” explained Lily as if reading his thoughts. “They are resting.”  
  
Scorpius nodded and followed her to the end of the corridor and down a seemingly infinite flight of stairs. They walked for long minutes, without talking, until Lily lit her wand and stretched her arm in front of her.  
  
It was only when a massive door blockaded their transit that they stopped. Lily lowered her wand and knocked forcefully three times on three different places.  
  
There was a slight cry on the other side of the door, and then some quick steps, and when the door opened Scorpius had just enough time to see a pair of arms wrapping around Lily’s neck before a young woman enveloped her into a hug.  
  
“Lily!” she cried. “I was so scared! My mum told us everything about last night! Oh, darling! Are you alright?” She tilted her head back and looked at her and finally Scorpius could see her face. She looked very much like the woman who had saved them the night before, only younger and without scars. She was beautiful, and he imagined that she was the daughter of that same woman.  
  
She finally saw Scorpius standing there and her eyes shone a little in the dim light of the corridor. “Oooh!” she giggled. “Is that the young man my mum was talking about? He is handsome!”  
  
Scorpius tried to smile at the woman, but she just grabbed Lily’s arm and dragged her inside.  
  
“More handsome than his father, that’s for sure,” came a voice from inside the room.  
  
Scorpius walked inside.  
  
“Close the door, Malfoy.”  
  
He did it without questioning and when he turned he found the woman that had saved them the night before sitting on an armchair with a baby in her arms.  
  
“Much more handsome than his father,” she repeated, eyeing Scorpius with a smile, “and much nicer. I wonder what Draco Malfoy would have to say about his son consorting with Harry Potter’s daughter.” She looked at Lily and winked.  
  
Lily took a deep breath as she made her way to her to kiss her. Then she lowered her head and pecked the baby’s forehead too. “Hello, Thomas,” she told the baby.  
  
“How do you know who I am?” asked Scorpius as the younger woman took the bag from his hands.  
  
The woman gave the baby to Lily and stood up. “I know everything, young man,” she told him in a low and dangerous voice. “Everything about everything.”  
  
“How—”  
  
“Nah,” she told him, waving a hand in his face, “I was at school with your daddy dearest and with Harry. Gryffindor I was, but still your father always knew how drag all the attention to himself.”  
  
Scorpius furrowed his brow as he observed the woman. Her scars seemed to have a pattern, like claws of some animal that had been dragged over her skin.  
  
The woman smirked at him. “Now I am the one who’s dragging the attention.”  
  
Scorpius flushed. “I’m… I’m sorry, Ma’am…”  
  
Lily giggled from the armchair. She cradled the baby in her arms and looked at Scorpius as if she found him blushing a highly amusing scene.  
  
“Oh! Lily! You brought us toys! You are the best!” beamed the younger woman.  
  
“Scorpius carried them,” said Lily, nodding towards him.  
  
The younger woman looked from her to him surprised. “I thought he was just the Auror assigned to protect you!” she exclaimed. “Oh my, oh my… I want to hear everything! Is he good looking under that uniform? Is he big?”  
  
“Iris!” exclaimed Lily, her own cheeks colouring a bit. “He  _is_  the Auror assigned to protect me!”  
  
Iris laughed as she stood from the floor where she was rummaging through the bag and walked to Scorpius. “Yeah, right… I can smell arousal all around this one, Lily.”  
  
“You’re not even a werewolf,” muttered Lily, refusing to look at Scorpius and focusing all her attention on the child.  
  
The older woman scrutinised Scorpius as her lips curved slightly upwards in a smile. “For as much as I’d like to tease Draco Malfoy’s son, now is not the time,” she said. “Have you managed to obtain documents for the Portkey, Lily?”  
  
“Hey! Wait a second!” snapped Scorpius suddenly. “Who are you? What’s happening? What… what’s going on? I’m an Auror! I need to know what’s happening here.”  
  
The woman cocked an eyebrow at him. “You don’t know?” she asked softly, before turning towards Lily. “You didn’t tell him?”  
  
Lily shook her head as she held the child to her chest. “I wanted to show him,” she replied softly.  
  
The woman nodded softly and turned to look at him once more. “Of course, Auror Malfoy—boy! Isn’t it strange to hear that?—by all means, sit down and I’ll tell you everything.”  
  
Scorpius walked towards the empty armchair next to where Lily was sitting and sat down as well. He glanced at the child, pushing a little, dimpled hand against Lily’s breast and envied him for a moment.  
  
“My name,” started the woman, tearing his attention from Lily’s chest, “is Lavender Brown. Have you ever heard of me?”  
  
Scorpius narrowed his eyes in concentration. “I… I’m not sure…”  
  
“I fought in the Second Wizarding War,” she continued. “I shall have a word with Professor McGonagall about making the students learn by heart the names of the people who fought in the war.” She followed that with a laugh, but Scorpius wasn’t completely sure she was joking. “Anyway, quite the battle that was,” she kept going, “people died, people won, people lost someone.” She paused and tilted her head back. “People got scars that they’ll have to bear for the rest of their lives.” She slid a finger over her face. “I was beautiful once, you know.”  
  
“Oh Mum! You’re still beautiful,” said Iris gently.  
  
“One of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen,” agreed Lily, nodding eagerly.  
  
She smiled and rolled her eyes playfully. “Don’t mind them, Scorpius,” she said, “they are biased.”  
  
“Who did that to you?” asked Scorpius softly.  
  
“Ever heard of Fenrir Greyback?” she asked lightly.  
  
He nodded quickly. “He’s in Azkaban, a special prisoner,” he told her, “I’ve seen him once… he was huge, hairy, ugly… and he looked… he looked inhuman.”  
  
Iris let out a little whine as she hid her face into her hands.  
  
Lavender seemed to stifle some sort of reaction. “Him,” she replied quietly, touching her scars again. “This is one of the souvenirs he left me.” She finally smiled and nodded towards her daughter. “The other is her.”  
  
Scorpius’ jaw dropped as he looked from Lavender to Iris. “You… you mean…”  
  
“My luck was that he took the time to rape me,” she confessed, her voice quivering. “And by the time he was ready to bite off my head, Hermione Granger—bless her—was hexing him for good.” She took a deep breath. “Iris is his daughter.”  
  
“I hate him!” Iris half-roared. “I hate him! Put me in his cell and I’ll tear his heart from his chest with my bare hands.”  
  
“I know, dear,” her mother soothed her.  
  
“But what’s the… what’s the problem? I mean, he’s in Azkaban, he’s not coming out any time soon. You’re safe.”  
  
Lavender shook her head. “The four gentlemen you met last night,” she replied, “Hans and the other three, they are members of his pack. Faithful to him and only him. They know he won’t come out of Azkaban, but still, they are so stupid as to try to recreate what they had before Voldemort’s downfall.”  
  
Slowly, comprehension was starting to dawn into Scorpius’ brain. “They want… your daughter…”  
  
Lavender snorted. “Oh no, that bunch of sexist animals,” she grunted, before nodding towards the baby. “They want Thomas.”  
  
Scorpius furrowed his brow as he looked at the baby.  
  
“My son,” said Iris.  
  
“Fenrir’s grandchild,” explained Lavender. “Things get around quickly amongst werewolves, the moment they got to know that she was expecting a boy they went completely crazy. They want to raise him in their pack and made him their leader.” She sighed. “My pack is much smaller and not as strong as theirs. I don’t know how long we can stand under their attacks.”  
  
Scorpius’ darkened. “You should go to the Ministry, or you should—”  
  
Iris laughed at him.  
  
“Don’t be ridiculous,” snorted Lavender curtly, “since when has the Ministry helped werewolves?” She didn’t let him protest. “No, we need a Portkey for Iris and Thomas. A Portkey to another country where they can be safe and live their lives like normal people.”  
  
“But the Ministry won’t issue them a Portkey,” said Lily, “because they don’t have the right documents for Thomas. He wasn’t born in St Mungo’s and wasn’t registered. And because of his family, they want to first examine him and determine whether he’s a human or a werewolf.”  
  
“He is a human,” stated Lavender. “But Fenrir was powerful, and people were afraid of him. And if the baby is classified as a werewolf, he will not be able to travel and they will get to him.”  
  
“All we need is the signature of an Auror,” whispered Lily. “We got a Healer already, but we need an Auror to sign it too. But the employees at the Ministry wouldn’t give the documents to an Auror.”  
  
Scorpius looked at Lily, she was staring at him gravely as if she wanted him to understand just how incredibly important that was for her.  
  
“Lily is our angel,” beamed Lavender, “and to think that she came to us to write an article on the life-style of werewolves. What was that again, Lily?”  
  
“Five months ago,” she replied.  
  
“Five months,” repeated Lavender. “Her editor is an airhead. She finished that article weeks ago.” She chuckled and added, “She had no idea we would drag her in such a mess.”  
  
“I’m happy I can help you,” she said sweetly.  
  
Lavender smiled at her before looking back at Scorpius. “Will you help us too, Scorpius?” she asked hopefully. “We talked about that, Lily said that you look much more human than most of your colleagues.”  
  
He looked back at Lily, but she was looking down at the child again, her cheeks all stained with red. He wanted to say yes, that he would help them. He wanted Lily to jump at his neck and maybe kiss him in gratitude. He wanted her to beam at him and then invite him to touch her breasts just like he—Scorpius shook his head. He looked back at Lavender’s expectant face. “Have you already talked to the Ministry? To Teddy maybe? I’m sure he’d be understanding of your situation…”  
  
“No,” said Lily, her voice heated, “no. The papers have been kept in the office for weeks. Nobody is answering our requests. Scorpius, you need to help us! Please!”  
  
Scorpius swallowed as he stood up and stepped towards Lavender. “I… I can’t… the documents need to go through the Ministry employees that know what to do with them. I can’t… I can’t help you like that…”  
  
“No!” snapped Lily as Iris hurried to take the child from her lap. She stood up as well and grabbed Scorpius’ uniform. “No! I trusted you! I thought you’d understand!”  
  
He grasped her wrists and looked at her almost pleadingly. “I’m… I’m sorry… I can’t help you, you need to file a request to the office and—”  
  
“We did everything!” cried Lily, shaking his uniform. “We did everything! You need to help us!”  
  
He looked at her big eyes as she stared up at him. “I… I can’t… I’m sorry, I could lose my job… I…”  
  
Lily let out a frustrated cry. She balled her hands into fists and pushed against his chest. “I hate you!” she cried, tears spilling over the corners of her eyes. “I thought you were different! I hate you!”  
  
Suddenly, the child started to cry and Lily gasped and looked crestfallen for having been the cause of the tears of the infant. She stopped punching Scorpius, shook her head and ran away.  
  
“Lily…” Was all he could murmur before she bolted for the door and then she was gone. He turned to look at Lavender and Iris, who was trying to calm the baby. “I’m… I’m sorry…”  
  
Lavender shook her head slightly. “Don’t worry,” she told him gently, “we understand. We’ve been dealing with this sort of things all our lives.” She glanced at the door and smiled. “Lily is a gentle soul. She can’t stand injustice. She is… she’s a wonderful human being.” She looked back at Scorpius and added, “Don’t worry about us.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” repeated Scorpius.  
  
But Lavender was already cooing the child over her daughter’s shoulder and Scorpius felt the urge to leave the two women alone.  
  
***  
  
“She specifically said,” hissed Dave, “that you can’t go up to see her.”  
  
“I don’t care what she said,” snapped Scorpius, “I need to see her.” He made to walk past him, but Dave stepped in front again. “Move,” growled Scorpius.  
  
The dark-skinned boy shook his head. “No.”  
  
Scorpius pushed against his thin chest. “I said move!”  
  
But Dave didn’t even budge. In fact Scorpius’ fingers came into contact with far more muscle than he had expected.  
  
“Get out,” snarled Dave, as he punched Scorpius in the eye with unexpected force and sent him to the ground.  
  
***  
  
“Don’t move, Scorpius. You’re acting like a baby.”  
  
Scorpius glared with one eye at his mother as she pressed some ice on his other one. “I’m sorry if it hurts,” he grunted. “And I can use magic to keep it there, no need for you to get a cramp.”  
  
“You just want to get rid of me, dear,” she replied placidly. “Because you know what’s coming next.”  
  
Scorpius closed his eyes. He would pinch the bridge of his nose too, but the ice pack was in the way. “Yes,” he replied, “my job is too dangerous, I don’t even need a job, I should just find a wife, get her pregnant and use my family money to live more than comfortably. I was just feeling rebellious when I joined the Aurors, and now I should stop, come back home every night and not give my mother a fright every time I don’t show up for two days in a row.” He sighed and added, “Sorry about that.”  
  
She shook her head lightly. “I wasn’t going to say anything like that,” she replied calmly, “I know it’s too late for me to make you even consider the possibility of leaving your exciting job.”  
  
“Then what is it, Mother? I’m tired, and I want to sleep and then go to Lupin tomorrow and tell him that I resign from the case and that he has to find Miss Potter a new Auror.”  
  
She sighed and looked at him. “Miss Potter looked very lovely the other night.”  
  
He darkened. “She was bringing home your wounded son, how did you even have time to look at her?”  
  
“I always look at prospective daughter-in-laws.”  
  
“Mother…”  
  
“I know,” she said, “she’s insufferable, with terrible taste in hairdos, too chatty, not interested in you in the least…”  
  
Scorpius blushed slightly. “Hey!” he protested weakly. He thought she was interested. At least a little bit… but maybe she was just playing with him in the hope of getting the papers signed.  
  
“Just because for once a girl doesn’t throw herself at your feet, Scorpius, it doesn’t mean she’s not worth the chase.”  
  
“I really don’t want to discuss my sentimental life with you, Mother.”  
  
“Shall I send your father?”  
  
“Oh Merlin, no!” he exclaimed. “I just need to sleep and then go to work tomorrow morning, talk to Teddy and then everything will be just fine, thank you very much.”  
  
She sighed as she stood up. “Of course, Scorpius,” she told him, bending to kiss his forehead like a child. “Good night, dear.”  
  
“Good night, Mother,” he replied.  
  
The moment she closed the door to his room, he closed his eyes and finally lay down on his massive four poster bed. He used magic to keep the ice pack against his face and tried to fall asleep.  
  
He couldn’t. Lily’s face floated amongst his thoughts. She was smiling at him, she was scoffing at him, she was screaming at him, she was telling him that she hated him. And then she was naked again, and she was so beautiful and now that she walked into the shower she was beckoning for Scorpius to follow her inside… and he couldn’t refuse her! Merlin helped him! He discarded his clothes on the floor and hastily joined her in the shower. She was soft and she was smooth and she asked him if the wound was still visible but he couldn’t reply for his mouth was already around her nipple and her hand was—  
  
“Fuck!”  
  
He blindly searched for his wand to clean up the mess in his pyjama bottoms and his hand. He rubbed a hand over his sweaty face and took a deep, discomfited breath.  
  
***  
  
Scorpius was staring at Teddy’s door as if it was the portal to hell.  
  
His uniform was all wrinkly where he was twisting and jerking it without thinking. In a few minutes – as soon as Teddy was done talking to James Sirius Potter – he would have gone in there and told him that he couldn’t follow that case anymore. What was the problem? James left the case too, why couldn’t Scorpius? He was ready to report biases if Teddy told him that he couldn’t leave the case.  
  
As soon as he got himself out of that mission, Scorpius would start working on some murder or kidnapping and everything would be back to normal. Nobody would drive him up the wall, or interrupt him while he spoke. Nobody would try to leave him behind in Knockturn Alley, or make him lose his head.  
  
He blinked and shook his head. Nobody had made him lose his head. He was fine. Lily Luna Potter meant nothing to him. She had just been his job. A crazy job. The worst job ever.  
  
Except maybe when she walked around her flat naked…  
  
No! The worst job ever! Under every aspect. She had just used him.  _Do you want an ice-cream, Scorpius? Help me get undressed, Scorpius… I thought I could trust you, Scorpius…  
  
I thought I could trust you…_  
  
She just needed him… just needed him to… to save the life of a child… because those stupid Ministry rules didn’t look anybody in the face… even when it was a little boy… just because he was Fenrir Greyback’s grandchild… of course he would be classified as a werewolf.  
  
But Scorpius should have known the feeling. His own family had been shunned from the Wizarding World for years after the Second Wizarding War. The Head Auror had gone against most people to let him join the Aurors, and nobody had ever mistreated him there. And he knew what everybody thought about his family. He knew what his family had done.  
  
Someone had done for him what he had been asked to do for the child…  
  
Shite.  
  
Teddy’s door opened suddenly and Scorpius started as James and Teddy walked out.  
  
“Scorpius,” said Teddy with a smile, “I got your message, come—”  
  
“I have to go,” he snapped, eyes wide. “I have to go!”  
  
He ignored Teddy’s and James’ expressions as they stared at him. He almost ran towards the lifts. The Department of International Magical Cooperation was on the fifth level, the one of Magical Transportation on the sixth.  
  
If he was lucky he could have had that Portkey in his hands before lunch and then he would take her out to a fancy restaurant.  
  
Just to celebrate, of course.  
  
***  
  
He wasn’t lucky.  
  
By the time he finally managed to walk into Mr Weasley’s office it was almost evening. The queue at the Department of International Magical Cooperation had been impossibly long and he had to lie and threaten and point his wand more times than it would probably be good for his career. But finally he managed to find the file of Thomas Brown and get his signature on it and finally make his way to the Department of Magical Transportation.  
  
“Auror Malfoy,” Mr Weasley greeted him calmly. “At what do I owe—”  
  
“I have the child’s papers,” he panted, “they are all in order. I need that Portkey,  _now_.”  
  
Mr Weasley seemed to pale. “Lower your voice,” he shushed him, “close the door and let me see them.”  
  
Scorpius did as he was told. He stared as Mr Weasley checked the papers. “How do you know about  _this_?” he asked, without looking up at him. “Did Lily tell you?”  
  
“No,” he replied, “she showed me.”  
  
Mr Weasley looked up at him. “The child?” he asked in disbelief.  
  
Scorpius nodded. “I need the Portkey, Mr Weasley,” he urged him.  
  
“Of course, of course,” replied the man. He drew out an empty Portkey request and started writing on it, copying some information from the child’s papers. “Any preferences about the destination?” he asked calmly.  
  
“What Lily said,” he replied promptly.  
  
“She didn’t say anything.”  
  
“Somewhere nice.”  
  
“Like what?”  
  
Scorpius bit his bottom lip. “Australia,” he finally said, “I’ve always wanted to go there.”  
  
***  
  
It was night already when Scorpius made his way to Lily’s building. The moon was still full up in the sky and the streets were deserted. Dave was nowhere to be found and Scorpius was glad for that. He climbed up the steps two at a time and almost jumped in front of Lily’s door, the documents carefully wrapped in a bag.  
  
He stopped to take a deep breath and tousle his hair before he knocked loudly on the door. He looked down at his uniform and tried to smooth it a bit with his free hand. Then he straightened his back and puffed up his chest, flexing his muscles a little as he did.  
  
No reply came from the other side.  
  
He knocked again, even more forcefully than before. Then, in the silence that followed his knocking, he could feel his heart thumping in his chest.  
  
Still no answer.  
  
He knocked again. “Lily,” he called her, “Lily, it’s me. Please, I need to talk to you.”  
  
He knew she would have never opened the door to him, but he at least needed her to listen to him, so that he could tell her what he was bringing.  
  
He knocked again. “Lily!”  
  
Nothing. He knocked again and again, until someone a couple of doors down peered out of the door and told him to give it a rest.  
  
“Lily! Open, please! I just need to talk to you!”  
  
Nothing. Scorpius tried to push against the door, but it was locked with a spell. For a moment fear started to grip his insides. What if she had gone to the club to be with the child and the two women? What if the other pack of werewolves had found her? He remembered the way that Hans looked at her. The way he talked to her.  
  
Bloody hell! If he laid a finger on her…  
  
He turned on his heels and started to walk towards the stairs.  
  
“What are you doing here?”  
  
He stopped and turned at once, and his heart somehow dislodged in the motion for he could feel it in his throat.  
  
Lily was there. Her door was only slightly ajar, and her head peered outside, her eyes were red as if she’d cried recently and her hand was gripping the side of the door to the point that her knuckles were all white.  
  
“Go away, Scorpius,” she told him bitterly. “I don’t have anything to say to you.” She started to close the door as she backed away from it, but Scorpius bolted for it.  
  
“No!” he cried, pushing against it. “No! Lily, you need to let me in. I need to talk to you. I swear I—”  
  
“Go away,” she whined, pushing on the other side of the door to try to close it.  
  
“No, Lily, you’re right, I’m an idiot,” he told her, “you’re right. And you should hate me because I am an insensitive git and it doesn’t matter if I think that I really care for you, and I’ve been a complete idiot and… and…”  
  
He managed to push the door open as her naked feet slid on the floor. She looked at him as if he was out of his mind – and probably he was – and shook her head. “Go away, Scorpius! You don’t understand! Just go!”  
  
“No, I do understand,” he told her urgently. “I do! I swear. I… I signed the documents and got the Portkey…” His voice trailed away as he stared at Lily’s expression changing slowly from irritated to surprised to finally shocked. He took a deep breath before continuing, “I spent the whole day at the Ministry, queuing for the Portkey. I… it’s a Quaffle and I asked for Australia because it’s far away, but they speak English and it’s nice, I’ve always wanted to go myself and—”  
  
She cut him off once again, but this time he didn’t mind. Her lips on his were so soft and wet and her tongue inside his mouth felt so good and her arms around his neck were pushing him down towards her and her fingers were pulling his hair and she was pressing him against the wall. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she chanted, punctuating every word with a kiss. “Thank you.” She let him go as quickly as she had assaulted him and Scorpius tried to follow her lips with his, but she grabbed the bag from his hand instead. She secured the bag close with a spell and opened the window. “Athena!” she called, before whistling loudly.  
  
A Snowy Owl flew through the window and she wasted no time fastening the bag to the claw of the bird. “Take it to Lavender,” she told the bird, “pass through the roof. Don’t fly near the ground, never near the ground, okay?”  
  
The owl hooted agreeably at her and took off through the window. She closed the windowpane again and turned to look at Scorpius.  
  
He smiled dumbly at her, his hand going to his hair to move it back from where it had fallen into his eyes. “I’m glad—”  
  
“Shut up,” she told him. “I don’t hate you, okay?”  
  
His smile, if possible, became even dumber. “I know,” he replied softly.  
  
“But you can be an idiot.”  
  
He nodded. “I know.”  
  
“Good.” She closed the distance between the two of them and threw her arms at his neck once more. “I can be an idiot too,” she admitted softly, her warm breath tickling his lips.  
  
“I know,” he repeated as he closed the distance between the two of them and kissed her just as passionately as she had kissed him.  
  
She pushed herself towards him, her perky, little breasts finally in contact with his chest. Even through their clothes he could tell that they were soft and turgid. He placed his hands on her waist and slid them down over her arse and on the underside of her thighs. He picked her up and she crossed her ankles on the small of his back, pushing herself against his groin as she did.  
  
“Fuck,” he breathed, leaning his forehead against hers and breaking the kiss as his cock grew uncomfortably hard against his uniform.  
  
She chuckled as she bit playfully on his earlobe.  
  
He panted in her dreadlocks. “I kind of want you right now,” he told her in a hiss.  
  
“Good, because I want you too,” she whispered in his ear.  
  
He didn’t let her say that twice, nor did he give her the time to change her mind. He took a few quick steps and placed her gently on the couch. She smiled at him as she sat up and knelt in front of him to unfasten his trousers.  
  
He grabbed her hands and pushed them back, until she was lying on the couch once again.  
  
“You don’t want me to—”  
  
“I’d like to last, thank you very much,” he murmured at her. “And first of all, something that I’d wanted to do ever since I laid my eyes on you.” He knelt on the floor and grasped the sides of her shirt, pulling them apart with a loud ripping sound and with buttons flying everywhere. He growled in approval when he noticed that she had forgone wearing a bra today too. He looked at her flushed face as he lowered his head and took one nipple into his mouth.  
  
She arched her back straight away, making the most beautiful keening sound he’d ever heard. He sucked hard on her tight nub and she wormed a hand into his hair, pushing him steadily against her chest. He laved her breast with his tongue as he brushed his fingers over the other one, until the other nipple was as firm as the one he was sucking.  
  
Her hips jerked slightly as her eyelids drooped and a litany of breathed curses left her lips. He grinned against her breast. His hand pinched her nipple subtly before he let it go to brush his fingertips over her ribs and down her tummy. He managed to worm them into her shorts and followed the curve of her mound, until he was cupping her between her legs.  
  
“Shite,” she screamed as he pressed his fingers against her clit. Her hands flew to his wrist, half hidden by her clothes. “Fuck… no, no, no, Scorpius, no… too much…” she whined.  
  
He grinned against her breast as he tortured her nipple with his teeth. His free hand went to grasp her wrists and push them away as he slipped a finger inside.  
  
Her legs bent and her toes curled and she tried to close her thighs around his hand, but it didn’t matter, Scorpius just didn’t know where to look anymore. Her pretty, little toes all tensed and jolting, her flushed face, her white teeth biting so hard on her bottom lip that he could see the little dents every time they moved a little, her hands which seemed to have no force to wriggle free from his grasp anymore.  
  
She stared at her as he pushed her over the edge, with just one finger inside and with another massaging her bundle of nerves and with his mouth on her nipple, which was all wet and red now. She arched her back and jerked her hips as if to try to get more friction against his digits. Or as if to worm away from him because of too much sensation.  
  
He tried to keep her in place and keep torturing her with his fingers and his mouth until she was begging him to stop that it was too much, that she was going to come again.  
  
And he would have made her come again and then again and again if his cock didn’t require his attention right bloody now.  
  
She took a deep breath and lay completely limp on the couch as he withdrew his hand from between her legs and brought his fingers to his mouth. He released her nipple with a wet pop and sucked on the finger that had been inside of her.  
  
She went back to bite her bottom lip hard, as he made a great scene of licking her tangy taste from his digit. He brought the second one, the one he had pressed against her clit, over her nipple and he was ready to smear it with her arousal and lick it off of her when she grabbed his hand and brought it to her mouth to suck it clean.  
  
He groaned as she took two fingers into her mouth and laved each inch of his skin, her tongue swirling around them and making him groan.  
  
“Fuck,” he breathed. His free hand went to his uniform, but he would have needed his other one too to free his erection.  
  
She seemed to read his mind and he loved it. She sucked harder on his fingers as she brought her hands to help him unbutton his uniform. She stared into his eyes as she wrapped her digits around his cock and made him impossibly hard with her teasing.  
  
He growled, but he hadn’t let her wrap her pretty, plump lips around him to avoid coming before he could savour her tightness. He wasn’t going to let her tease him like that. He pulled his fingers from her mouth and she whined a little, trying to follow them and pecking at his fingertips in an affectionate way.  
  
He smiled softly at her and stood from the floor. He knelt between her legs and worked his fingers over the tight buttons of her shorts. She had to help him slip one out of its little hole and let out a breathy laugh when he growled with impatience.  
  
He grasped her knickers and her shorts in his hands and brought them down over her hips and her thighs. But he was painfully hard and she was too inviting and the thought of having to bring those shorts all the way down her legs and then throw them to the floor seemed like a herculean task right now.  
  
Instead, he stopped when they were hanging around her knees and grabbed the back of her thighs, he threw her heels over his shoulder and lined himself up with her entrance. He stared into her eyes as he pushed inside and…  
  
Merlin. She was so tight, and her walls were still fluttering slightly around him, but she was so wet, she was drenching, and he slid inside so perfectly. Her heels dug into his shoulder as she arched her back and when his groin came into contact with her smooth, round arse he finally groaned in delight.  
  
“Fuck,” she murmured, her hands grasping his knees.  
  
“Oh yes,” he groaned. And then he was exiting her, slowly and teasingly, and then he was pushing back in again and she was rotating her hips a little and pushing back against him with every thrust.  
  
He grasped her legs until he was sure that she would have sported ten little oval-shaped bruises. He hoped Dave would see them next time she walked downstairs with a pair of shorts or a pretty little dress.  
  
Finally Scorpius let the heat that was pooling in his lower abdomen drive his movements into her. She let out a delightful cry as he started to put pressure on his knees to find the leverage to fuck her with a faster pace. She tightened suddenly around him, her nails digging into his legs as she came for the second time.  
  
And she was too tight now and too warm and too bloody wet and Scorpius just closed his eyes and let out a groan as he felt his balls tighten and spilled inside of her. “Bloody hell,” he grunted as he toppled forward, still inside of her, folding her in two.  
  
“Ouch,” she cried, “fuck…” And then she laughed as he exited her and lay half on top of her and half on the soft couch and started to worship her breasts a bit more.


	4. The One with the Happy Ending

***

When Scorpius opened his eyes, the sun was already up high in the sky. The sheet around his naked body was all rolled up and his legs were trapped in the material. He didn’t try to smooth it out, but closed his eyes again and turned on the bed. He stretched an arm towards Lily as a smile stretched his lips.  
  
His hand closed around thin air instead of a mass of dreadlocks, though. He opened his eyes again as his palm came into contact with the mattress, his smile faltering on his face.  
  
He pushed himself up and tried to strain his ears to listen to any kind of sound in the flat. There wasn’t any. “Lily.” he called gently. “Lily?”  
  
Nobody replied. He rubbed his fingers over his eyes and looked around himself. Her clothes, the ones that he had thrown to the floor the night before, were nowhere to be found.  
  
“Lily?” he called again. This time a bit more forcefully.  
  
Still nothing.  
  
“Bloody hell,” he growled. He pushed away the covers and started the hard quest of locating his clothes.  
  
Where the heck was she? If she’d gone to see the child and the Browns again, he was going to… he was going to… Oh yes! He was going to give her a good nice spank. And then he would have rubbed his hands all over her red arse until she whimpered. And then…  
  
And then he would have done so many more things to her, but he couldn’t think about them now, because he should have been angry with her and not getting aroused all over again.  
  
He had told her the night before not to worry about the Portkey! He had told her that mother and child would leave this morning, in all safety to Australia. To not go there, that it was dangerous. And yes, of course, while he said that he was eating her out and alternating a word to a lick a suck or a nip, or as he explained how he had gotten hold of the papers of the child she was blowing him and he wasn’t exactly sure that she had paid attention to everything – or anything at all – that he had said, or that he had made a whole lot of sense, but…  
  
“Bloody hell! When I find her, I’m going to tie her up to her bed and then spank her until she begs me.”  
  
“Hmm,” came a hum from the door of the bedroom. “And then, what are you going to do to me?”  
  
Scorpius jerked his head towards Lily as he struggled to drag his underwear over his hips. His jaw dropped as he looked at her, perfectly dressed and looking pretty as always.  
  
When he manage to regain a bit of composure, he darkened. “Dammit, Lily!” he snapped. “Where were you? I thought you’d gone to see the Browns! I was about to come and drag you away before you got yourself into trouble again!”  
  
Her lips spread into a smile. She raised a paper bag near her face. “I went to get some breakfast,” she replied, “hope you like bacon and eggs.”  
  
He closed his eyes and rubbed a hand over his face. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, feeling utterly relieved.  
  
When she giggled he heard her bubbly laughter incredibly close to him. “You were worried for me,” she told him.  
  
He looked down at her. “Of course, I was,” he grunted.  
  
“Because I’m your job,” she grinned.  
  
“Stop teasing.”  
  
“Because you had some amazing sex last night.”  
  
“It was amazing,” he conceded. “But not just for that…”  
  
“Because you care about me.”  
  
He looked at her and took a deep breath. “Yeah.”  
  
She stood on tiptoes and kissed him softly on his lips. “Hmm, why don’t you take a shower and I’ll fix us breakfast?”  
  
He slid his hands over her back and pulled her to him. “Why don’t you join me in the shower and we’ll fix breakfast together later?”  
  
She grinned. “Sounds inviting, but I’ve already taken one,” she told him, “and I need to dig the article out of my chest of drawers and I don’t even remember the password to get past those annoying animals.”  
  
“Try ‘Scorpius Malfoy is hot’,” he drawled with a grin.  
  
She shook her head and chuckled. “Go and take that shower,” she told him, patting his chest, “and then… you know, I don’t have to bring the article in until this evening, so…”  
  
He kissed her until her back arched and her feet almost left the floor. And when he let her go and she turned, he gave her a playful slap on her arse and looked at her as she giggled and walked away.  
  
He went into the bathroom, without bothering with the door, and turned on the water in the shower. Merlin, he felt wonderfully sated and pleasantly tired. And he was looking forward to the post-breakfast promises of more mind-blogging sex.  
  
He discarded his underwear on the floor, waited for the water to turn the right temperature and stepped inside.  
  
“How do you want your eggs?” came Lily’s voice from the kitchen.  
  
He lathered himself up with strawberry scented soap. “Scrambled,” he replied over the rumble of the water.  
  
“Strangled?”  
  
“Scrambled,” he repeated louder, before snickering at the conversation. She had probably waited all her life for that joke, but it was cute. Or she was cute, anyway.  
  
“This stupid drawer won’t open,” she complained as a delicious smell of fried bacon and scrambled eggs started to reach him even in the shower.  
  
“We’ll try a spell, don’t worry,” he told her as he rinsed himself, “I know some that are quite useful… if you don’t care too much about the fate of your furniture.”  
  
There was a loud crash coming from the living room and Scorpius startled for a second before chuckling softly. He could see the drawer already in pieces. “You alright, Lily?” he called from the bathroom.  
  
She didn’t reply and he just shook his head as he turned off the water. He grabbed for a towel and felt his cock stiffen a little as he thought that that same piece of material had been wrapped around Lily’s delectable body.  
  
“Baby?” he called her, the nickname giving him a little jolt of pleasure even as he said it.  
  
Still she didn’t reply. He furrowed his brow and for a moment the thought of her unconscious under the chest of drawer filled his thoughts.  
  
Then something heavy fell to the floor, crashing as it did.  
  
Scorpius straightened his back. He stared at the slightly ajar door that led back to her bedroom. He held his breath as he silently Summoned his uniform and buttoned it up quickly. What the hell was going on?  
  
“Lily?” he called tentatively.  
  
No answer.  
  
He stretched his wand in front of him. His wet hair was pouring water down his neck and back, but he didn’t care. He walked as silently as he could into the bedroom and then stepped into the living room.  
  
And Lily was there. On her feet, behind the couch, her brown eyes wide as she stared at Scorpius.  
  
“Lily—”  
  
“Scorpius, it’s a tra—”  
  
A dark skinned hand clamped over her mouth as Dave emerged from behind the couch. His wand pressed into Lily’s neck.  
  
“A trap, she wanted to say,” sneered Dave.  
  
Scorpius’ wand was pointed at Dave’s head before the boy could add a word, but a single movement from him and Scorpius knew that he could have used Lily as a shield.  
  
“Let her go, Dave,” growled Scorpius, “and I promise that I won’t hex your bollocks off.”  
  
Lily’s eyes were huge on her face as she stared at Scorpius. He glanced at her before returning his attention to Dave.  
  
The boy was sneering in his face. “Please,” he hissed, “you will lower your wand right at this moment if you don’t want me to blow her head.” He pressed his face into her dreadlocks and kissed her softly. His eyes closing for a moment before he looked back at Scorpius. “Put your wand down,” he told him. “Down. Good boy.” He smirked as Scorpius threw his wand to the floor. Then he rubbed his face against Lily’s head. “She smells so good,” he murmured, “that’s what Hans always says. That her scent drives him insane.” He laughed and added, “I have my theory. I think it’s because she smells like Harry Potter and we all hate the Boy-Who-Lived for what he did to Fenrir, and the idea of having his little pup to play with…” He shivered and rolled his head. “Just the idea makes my head spin.”  
  
“You’re a werewolf,” hissed Scorpius.  
  
“Good job, Auror,” he sneered. “Now, I need you to tell me where and when that Portkey will activate, because you see… we really didn’t like it that much that you would go and get those papers and manage to get a Portkey for the child after all our efforts and money to bribe those employees at the Ministry.”  
  
“You’ll have to kill me before I tell you.”  
  
“Kill you, ah of course you’d say that,” sneered Dave, “what about killing her?” He pressed the wand into Lily’s neck and her eyes became even wider as she brought her hands to his. “Shall we play a game? A little game… we love games in the pack… I count up to three and if you don’t tell me… puff. She’s gone.”  
  
Scorpius swallowed thickly. “I don’t think Hans will be too happy to hear that,” he hissed.  
  
“He’ll have the child, he’ll be happy enough. One.”  
  
Scorpius gritted his teeth. “Kill her and I won’t tell you anything.”  
  
“Two.”  
  
Lily’s eyes widened as she stared at Scorpius.  
  
“Three.”  
  
“Okay!” cried Scorpius. “I’ll tell you! Just let her go!”  
  
Lily tried to shake her head in despair. He was sure that she would be begging for her death if she could speak.  
  
“You tell me and then I’ll let her go,” smirked Dave.  
  
Scorpius glared at him. “It’ll activate in half an hour, at the Ilkley Moor Quidditch Stadium,” he replied in a growl, “it’s an old Quaffle in the middle of the pitch.”  
  
“Thank you, Auror Malfoy,” sneered Dave before whispering something into Lily’s ear. Her eyes grew even wider for a moment before Dave laughed and then Disapparated with the girl secured in his arms.  
  
Scorpius stared at the spot where they had just disappeared.  
  
“Fuck,” he muttered. That complicated everything.  
  
***  
  
The moment he Apparated on the terraces of the Ilkley Moor Quidditch Stadium, Scorpius knew that all the werewolves were waiting for the Browns to walk into the pitch, jump on them and kidnap the baby.  
  
Scorpius couldn’t see them, but the air was filled with their wild stench.  
  
He hoped fervently that they hadn’t touched Lily, that no action had followed their crude words and terrible intentions. That they were keeping her there as a hostage, waiting for the Browns to do anything to save her life. Even give them the child.  
  
But they could have waited forever if they wanted the Browns.  
  
Or not.  
  
Lavender Brown walked gingerly into the pitch and Scorpius crouched on the floor of the terraces and stared at her through the legs of the chairs. She made her way to the Quaffle in the middle of the field and Summoned it into her hands.  
  
The moment it flew in her outstretched palms, the Greys Apparated all around her, with Dave still holding Lily in his arms. Scorpius focused on her and even from that distance he was relieved to see that she was not harmed. She did look incredibly irate as she tried to wriggle free from her captor.  
  
Scorpius gripped his wand with force as he raised his head to look around himself. His eyes met Potter’s. He was crouching too and when he noticed Scorpius he raised three fingers near his head.  
  
Then two.  
  
Then one.  
  
Next thing Scorpius knew, he was into the pitch with the other Aurors. Lavender Brown had gone back to being Teddy Lupin and had already took down two werewolves alone.  
  
Scorpius had gone for Lily the moment he had Apparated behind Dave’s back. The werewolf had barely time to notice what was happening before a Stunning Spell sent him to the ground with a thud. Scorpius had just the time to disentangle Lily from his arms before dragging her away.  
  
“It was a trap,” she babbled still in shock. “It was a trap.”  
  
Scorpius pulled her towards the terraces and made her sit on one of the chairs. “Are you okay?” he asked her, turning to look at the Aurors fighting the werewolves. “Can you stay here without me?”  
  
She nodded. “It was a trap,” she repeated.  
  
He winked at her. “I’m not an idiot after all, am I?”  
  
She shook her head, still too shocked to reply.  
  
“Sweet,” he chuckled, before bending to kiss her and bolting back to the pitch to go and help his fellow Aurors.  
  
***  
  
The pack of the Greys would finally be reunited with their leader. Probably not in the way they had hoped, though. But they were going to spend the rest of their lives in Azkaban right next to Fenrir Greyback’s cell, so they should have thanked them, as Teddy kept repeating.  
  
Scorpius was congratulated by his fellow Aurors with pats on his bruised shoulders and a rather unmanly hug from James as a thank you for saving his little sister.  
  
He disentangled himself from them rather quickly though and made his way to where Lily was still sitting, her head hidden in her hands.  
  
“Hey,” he called as he approached her, “are you okay?”  
  
She raised her head and looked at him, eyes shining with too many emotions. “You were awesome,” she muttered. “I honestly thought… I honestly thought that you’d sell Thomas in exchange for my life…”  
  
He blinked, unable to find a fitting reply to that. “Yeah… I…”  
  
“I wish you’d told me,” she confessed almost frantically.  
  
“I didn’t want to put you into danger…”  
  
“I’m not a little girl,” she told him seriously.  
  
“Oh Merlin! Never thought that.” He knelt in front of her and cupped her cheek. “But it was just… you know… a typical Auror’s way of thinking. Go and get the baddies, but keep the plan as secret as possible…”  
  
She gave him the hint of a smile and nodded.  
  
He smiled back and stretched his neck to kiss her, but she tilted her head back. “I think I should go home,” she murmured.  
  
He nodded. “Come on, I’ll put you to bed.”  
  
She shook her head. “No,” she replied, “I’m… I’m fine. You don’t need to.”  
  
“I want to,” he replied softly, his voice a bit panicky.  
  
She smiled as she stood up.  
  
He stood as well. “Lily…”  
  
“Listen, Scorpius,” she murmured, “you were awesome and I’ll… I’ll owl you if I need your help again, okay?”  
  
“But…”  
  
“Please,” she whispered frantically. “I just need to go and clear my head for a bit, okay?”  
  
His shoulders dropped a little, as he nodded. “Sure… I… I understand,” he stammered, not understanding her in the slightest.  
  
She smiled gratefully, standing on tiptoes, she pecked his cheek and then she was gone with a loud pop.  
  
***  
  
“You were bloody awesome,” James complimented Scorpius. “Bloody awesome. We’ve been looking for a way to catch that pack for years.”  
  
Strangely, James’ compliments didn’t do anything to Scorpius. He imagined that it was because he was the wrong Potter.  
  
“Thanks,” he said stiffly.  
  
James smiled at him and patted his shoulder. “Hey,” he told him, “my sister is a wild one. You’ll never know how she’ll react to something or what she’ll do next. I wouldn’t be surprised if she left for Antarctica or for Hawaii again next week. Maybe it’s better this way…”  
  
Scorpius groaned as he looked at him. “Potter,” he sighed, “don’t try to cheer me up, you’re doing a lousy job.”  
  
James chuckled in reply. “My cousin is free if you’re interested, actually most of them are, you know…”  
  
“Except for my wife,” pointed out Teddy.  
  
“Except for Vicky.”  
  
Scorpius shook his head. “I need to go,” he growled.  
  
“Good luck with your new case,” said Teddy.  
  
“Yeah, good luck,” echoed James.  
  
He didn’t even turn to acknowledge them.  
  
***  
  
Scorpius played with the beef bourguignon in his plate. He stabbed it and stared at the blood and juice overflowing from the meat without interest.  
  
“Scorpius, only children play with their food,” said his mother condescendingly.  
He darkened and stabbed it more forcefully.  
  
His father cleaned his mouth in an expensive napkin. “Still sulking over Miss Potter?” he asked. “You should go there and tell her how you feel instead of killing that beef that is already dead.”  
  
He glanced at him and darkened even more. “You don’t understand,” he muttered.  
  
“Of course, I don’t,” he drawled, “it’s been centuries since I was your age, I couldn’t possibly understand the sufferings of being in love.”  
  
His mother giggled far more heartily than Scorpius thought necessary. “I never said I was in love,” he replied pointedly.  
  
“You don’t have to,” replied his mother gently. “It’s all over your face.”  
  
“And your posture,” added his father, “you look like a hunchback.”  
  
Scorpius shook his head as he stabbed the peas now. “Well, it doesn’t really matter, does it? She told me that she’ll owl me if she needs me. It wasn’t exactly a declaration of love.”  
  
“You never know, Scorpius, maybe she—”  
  
“I’m not hungry,” he cut his mother off. “I’m off to bed.”  
  
***  
  
“…and this is my cat,” said Mrs Plight, “Madam Fluff. And this one is my other cat, Mr Whiskers, and this one—”  
  
“Mrs Plight,” sighed Scorpius, pushing the cup of tea in his hands on the low coffee table that stood between the flowery couch where he sat and the old armchair. “I thought you said that you’ve heard someone on the roof, and that’s why you Floo Called the Aurors.”  
  
“Oh, there was someone,” she replied gently, her wrinkled face getting even more wrinkly, “but I think it was a cat. Would you be a lamb and go and get it for me?”  
  
“Over the roof? Have you tried Summoning it down?” he groaned.  
  
She looked scandalised at him. “You can’t Summon a cat!” she replied. “The poor fellow would have a heart attack!”  
  
“I’ll Apparate it down then,” sighed Scorpius.  
  
“Oh no, no, no,” she told him severely, “you’ll need to go and get it. There’s a ladder in the attic.” She smiled gratefully and added, “I’ll make another cup of tea in the meantime.”  
  
Scorpius looked at her as she stood with difficulties from the armchair and made her way into the kitchen.  
  
Merlin, he would have given his wand to be at Lily’s flat or to be fighting against some werewolves at that very moment, instead he had to make his way to the stairs to go and get a cat from the roof. Bloody hell…  
  
***  
  
“The Head Auror is back,” announced Teddy. “We’re having a little party in his office if you want to…” His words trailed away as he stared at Scorpius.  
  
“I think I’m going home,” he replied darkly. Pigeon poop was still decorating his shoulders from that afternoon and he was all sore from the fall from Mrs Plight’s roof.  
  
“I’m sure he’d love to have a word with you, Scorpius,” said Teddy gently. “To congratulate you on the werewolf case and for saving his daughter.”  
  
Scorpius nodded warily. “Tell him it was a pleasure,” he sighed. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”  
  
Teddy nodded, but he didn’t add anything else as Scorpius walked out of his office.  
  
***  
  
The first thing that Scorpius noticed when he walked out of the chimney of the drawing room was the small Snowy Owl perched over the back of an armchair. It kind of looked familiar.  
  
The bird looked at Scorpius and hooted loudly at him, before raising its tail and pooping all over the expensive Persian rug.  
  
“Well, good job,” he told the bird.  
  
The owl hooted again and raised a little claw in front of him. A letter was tied to it.  
  
“Is it for me?”  
  
The owl hooted for the third time and turned its head upside down.  
  
“Alright,” he sighed, going to untie the letter. “Thank you,” he told the animal absent-mindedly.  
  
He opened the envelope and his jaw dropped, before looking down at the owl again.  
  
Bloody hell! Of course! Lily’s bird!  
  
He felt his heart jumping up to nestle between his tonsils as he collapsed on the couch to read the letter.

> _Hey Scorpius,_
> 
> _I hope you’re okay. I’m not quite sure I said thank you enough that day. I was really in shock, which I’ll admit is not very flattering for you. I just thought… No, I don’t even know what I was thinking. You were cool. No, you were amazing and… I was just really surprised that you wouldn’t tell me anything… Anyway, I talked to Iris and Thomas and they are having the time of their lives in Australia. They invited me to go and visit them, I think I might…_
> 
> _Anyhow, I told you that I would owl you if I needed you, right? I kind of need you… I mean, I’m in quite the predicament and I really need your help. I don’t know if you want to help me after how I treated you the other day, but… yeah, if you want to give me a hand, it’d be cool if you could meet me Sunday at twelve in Islington. You know where Jamie’s is? Well, there. Yes, that’d be cool._
> 
> _Don’t wear your Auror uniform. It’s an undercover mission._
> 
> _Love,_
> 
> _Lily xxx_

  
Scorpius’ heart hammered in his chest by the time he reached the end of the letter.  
  
“I heard hooting. You’ve got post, Scorpius?” asked his father as he walked into the drawing room with the Daily Prophet tucked under his arm. He stopped in his tracks as he saw the bird and then spotted the poop on the rug. “Bloody bird!” he cursed.  
  
Scorpius just burst into laughter and right at that moment he couldn’t have cared less about the rug or his father’s glare.  
  
***  
  
Jamie’s was a Muggle restaurant.  
  
Apparently it was good, and Scorpius was looking forward to eating there. Because, come on!  _Meet me in front of Jamie’s_  could only mean that they were going to eat there. Scorpius was not an idiot. He was an Auror. And a bloody good Auror too. And he knew what came after lunch. He would kiss her in an alley and then Apparate her to her flat and then… well, he was ready to call in sick on Monday morning just to spend the whole week naked with her and finally take that shower that he had been dreaming to every since—  
  
“Hi.”  
  
Scorpius startled as images of a nude Lily dissolved in front of him. He looked down at the real Lily – who was dressed in a flowery dress and sported a shy, little smile – and felt his spine disappear from his body.  
  
“Hi,” he replied, his voice a bit too high and breathy not to make him blush. He coughed and tried again, but it just came out as ridiculous as the first time.  
  
She chuckled gently at his embarrass, before lowering her eyes and pulling a couple of dreadlocks behind her ear. “Thank you for meeting me here,” she told him, “I didn’t think you’d come.”  
  
Scorpius cleared his throat. “You said you needed me,” he croaked out. “And here I am…”  
  
She smiled warmly at him and he felt his heart melt a little and probably drip down through his ribs, because he could hear it thump in his stomach now.  
  
“Thank you,” she told him. She grabbed his hand into hers and he was already starting to cross the street to get to the restaurant when she pulled him towards a little side alley.  
  
He furrowed his brow, but followed her for a good five minutes through little, quaint streets and in front of Muggle shops without uttering a word. Bloody hell, he had worn his best suit, and he was looking rather ridiculous really, but he had hoped for a romantic Sunday—blimey! A romantic Sunday lunch! Sunday lunches weren’t romantic! They were those things that they did between friends. If she had said brunch at least… But she hadn’t and she hadn’t said lunch either now that he thought about that.  
  
Shite, shite, shite. She actually had meant work. A mission of some sort. He was just working. She was just his job all over again.  
  
He cleared his throat again and tried to sound as professional as he could. “So… what’s this mission again, Lily?” he asked nonchalantly.  
  
She turned to look at him and smiled. “You’ll see.”  
  
“Alright… can you tell me where we are going at least?” he asked seriously.  
  
She shook her head. “If you knew you probably would Disapparate home right this minute,” she chuckled.  
  
“Please,” he replied rather annoyed, “I’m an Auror. I’m not scared of anything.”  
  
She giggled at him and kept walking. Finally, she dragged him through a small alley and into a little square with a park and in front of it an impressive row of expensive houses that stood behind an elaborated iron fence.  
  
She stopped in front of number 11 and seemed to focus on something in front of her. Suddenly, the row of houses started to move as another building emerged from between them. The number 12 was emblazoned on the door of the new house.  
  
Lily tightened her fingers around his hand.  
  
“What… what place is this?” asked Scorpius, trying to find a sign with the name of the street.  
  
“Twelve Grimmauld Place,” replied Lily simply.  
  
Scorpius dug his heels into the ground and made her stop. “What?” he asked with his voice high. “That’s… that’s the Head Auror’s home address.”  
  
She smiled brightly at him. “Good job, Auror Malfoy,” she told him.  
  
He swallowed. “Lily, why are we here?”  
  
She grinned. “I told you, I need your help, Scorpius,” she replied sweetly, “you need to save me from boring conversation and questions about when I finally decide to settle down with someone.”  
  
Scorpius’ jaw dropped. “But… but that’s… that’s your parents’…”  
  
“House,” she supplied. “Indeed, and I’m inviting you to Sunday dinner. Don’t worry, my mum cooks beautifully.”  
  
He made a high-pitched sound of discomfort.  
  
She chuckled once more, before raising her hand to play with his tie. “The house is big, you know,” she murmured, “with lots of unused bedrooms and secluded little bathrooms. And all of my family is there, they won’t even notice that we’re gone between a course and another.”  
  
He swallowed, torn between squealing in delight at what she was suggesting and squirming in fear. “Bet your father will notice,” he groaned.  
  
She giggled. “Good thing you’re not afraid of anything then.”  
  
“Bloody hell.”  
  
He was about to look down at Lily and plead with his eyes to take his hand and let him take her somewhere else, when she threw her arms around his neck and pressed her soft lips against his own.  
  
He melted completely and sighed against her mouth. She tilted her head back and looked into his eyes. “I love you,” she whispered, “do you want to try to make this work?”  
  
He blinked. “I thought you were thinking about going to Australia…” he pointed out.  
  
She kissed him again. “Yeah,” she replied, “with you, idiot.”  
  
A dumb smile crept on his face. He wrapped his arms about her body and squeezed her tightly, before kissing her back and making her go round. “You bet I want to make this work!” he laughed. “Let’s go to Australia right now!”  
  
She laughed with him, but slapped his arm jokingly. “Now you’re just trying to get yourself out of this meal,” she quipped. “Let’s go and meet my family.”  
  
“I know your family,” he protested, trying to resist her dragging him towards the main door. “I work with half of them.”  
  
She chuckled again as she came to a stop in front of the door and knocked loudly. “Now don’t worry,” she told him, “if Uncle George slips something in your Butterbeer, don’t drink it, okay?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“And if Auntie Hermione asks you what your position on house-elves welfare is, you always go with S.P.E.W.”  
  
“With  _what_?”  
  
“And most importantly—Daddy!”  
  
“Most importantly  _what_?” groaned Scorpius in a murmur.  
  
“Peanut!” exclaimed the Head Auror as he opened the door and squeezed his daughter in a tight embrace. “I missed you! Teddy was just about to tell me everything about your exploits with Lavender and the werewolves.”  
  
“Teddy speaks entirely too much,” said Lily, before grabbing Scorpius’ hand again. “Daddy, this is Scorpius.”  
  
The Head Auror eyed him from head to toe. “Well, don’t I know him?”  
  
“Sir,” croaked out Scorpius.  
  
Lily grinned from ear to ear. “You know Dad, we’re thinking about going to Australia next week.”  
  
The Head Auror looked from Scorpius to Lily and then back. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed and stretched a hand towards Scorpius. Contrary to what the young man thought, he didn’t smack him on the head, but he closed it on his shoulder. “She’s already dragging you into her crazy world, isn’t she?” he asked him gently. “Come on in you two, Uncle Ron is eating the potatoes out of the casserole and your mother has hexed him twice already.”  
  
Lily giggled as she made her way inside and Scorpius couldn’t help following her since her fingers were secured around his hand.  
  
And boy, was he glad she had dragged him to meet her parents! Especially when she invited him to go and see her old room between the roasted chicken and dessert…

FIN


End file.
